


Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars

by blueraspberrybubblegum



Series: Lift It Like It's Heavy [4]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Anal Sex, Blindness, Dream Therapy, M/M, Oral Sex, Pale Porn, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Porn With Plot, Pretend Threesome, Red Romance, hunger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-12
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-27 06:32:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12075462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueraspberrybubblegum/pseuds/blueraspberrybubblegum
Summary: In which Dave spends four days in a metaphorical cocoon and emerges a beautiful butterfly; or: In which Karkat wants to try something new, and Dave just wants his clothes back.





	Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Long time no see! <3
> 
> This story is a direct sequel to Chapter 18 of Lift It Like It's Heavy and is very, very Porn with Plot. It is also basically chock full of spoilers for LILIH, so be warned! Some quick notes:
> 
> \- If you're just here for the porn, welcome! There's plenty.  
> \- If you're here for the Davekat, you might also want to check out [Chapter 18.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/686370/chapters/14899873)  
> \- If you're wary of spoilers or just want to start from the beginning, there are two ways to do so! You can start with [the prequel](http://archiveofourown.org/works/671065/chapters/1226716) or go ahead and dive into [the main work.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/686370/chapters/1259883)
> 
> I'm so happy to finally be able to deliver this story. Enjoy!

“Nothing against dinner meetings, but that was a rare form of torture,” you say, shoving the front door shut with your shoulder. The immense hardwood door latches itself with a bang that echoes down the hall and knocks the breath from your lungs in a huff. You leverage Karkat’s arm to right yourself; he’s as tense as a spring and as done with today as you are. “Next time I spend two hours arguing about a funeral it better be my own.”

Karkat, growling through his clenched teeth, tugs you away from the door. “If Jade were here, the corpse party would’ve been over with by now! I hate dragging this shit out. I get that the whole planning process is therapeutic for Roxy but all it’s doing for the rest of us is making a deeply traumatic event even more psychologically scarring.”

You roll your eyes to the ceiling purely for his benefit. “Tell me about it. If I’d have known I was trading my own comfortably overbearing Lalonde for the Ur-Mom edition…”

“You what?” Karkat snaps, turning his hair-thin patience on you. “You would’ve let Jade die instead? Don’t be ridiculous.”

Taken aback by his tone, you stumble over your own feet. _Guess the wedding is still a no-fly zone. There goes the mood. Way to go, Dave, it was already done for but you put it right out of its misery._

Sarcasm’s not much of a coping mechanism anyway. It’s only really good for deflecting, but it keeps Rose’s death at arm’s length. So you deflect as hard as you can.

“You’re right, Roxy’s not _that_ bad. I’d pick her over Bro any day. Fuck, hand me the adoption papers, I’d disown that bastard so hard he’d be paying back his tax exemptions for years. You know what, I bet if I just showed up on Rose’s doorstep one day her mom would’ve dubbed me Daviekins and had my face pasted all over the Lalonde family photo album within 20 minutes. Rose and I would have run that house, seriously, we’d have been unstoppable. As long as we pretended like I belonged there her mom would’ve never even batted an eyelash.”

Karkat sighs, adopting a more understanding tone that is somehow worse. “Dave… she was your _sister_. No one blames you for not wanting to talk about it. I don’t think you need to come to these meetings at all. Just… let Roxy do her thing, okay? When Jade comes home we’ll have a nice, pleasant corpse party and put it all behind us.”

You shut your mouth. He’s trying to be supportive, but it doesn’t change the fact that he’s obviously still hung up on the question of whether you could have stopped Rose from offing herself once she had her mind made up. At least he’s not acting like you killed her yourself anymore, but... yeah. That’s one of those fights where everyone loses, isn’t it?

The thing is – you know you’re supposed to miss Rose… and you do, mostly, but it’s hard to grieve when you’re still pissed about the way she fucked over Kanaya _on their fucking wedding day_ and left it up to you to defend her after she decided that she was disposable in a way that you were somehow not.

It’s like Bro all over again, somehow, except his sacrifice seemed noble in spite of his lifelong war against sincerity, while hers felt… indulgent. Self-serving.

It’s not guilt. It’s _not_.

“What’s the alternative? Get the boo-hooing out of our systems now and when Jade gets back we’ll just tell her ‘Sorry, one of your oldest friends died while you were gone but it was like two months ago so we’ve all moved on already, it sucks and all but try to keep up.’”

“We could have two corpse parties,” Karkat says dryly.

“ _Kill me_.”

He snorts. “I’m not done with you yet,” he says, too matter-of-factly to be ominous. “Let’s go upstairs already. I’ve been adulting all day and I’m sick of it, and you still owe me for this morning.”

“Owe you,” you echo, tasting the words. They don’t ring a bell. “Owe you for what?”

“Do you even remember this morning?”

“Do I remember…” you repeat, mystified, and then it comes rushing back.

Hell yes you remember this morning. It’s your favorite memory this year and a dark horse candidate for your top five of all time.

“What do I owe you for this morning?” you ask suspiciously. Because yeah sex is awesome and you’re even down for a little roleplay but you’re not on board with it being transactional in a real world sense. Kind of kills it, if you’re being honest. Plus you’re pretty sure Bro would be rolling in his grave if a Strider ever stooped to paying for sex. More like you should be demanding compensation, satisfaction guaranteed or your money back, because yeah earning that SEX DIETY achievement badge means that you never leave your partner hanging.

Okay, you’re kidding about the badge. Mostly. It was kind of an inside joke between you and Jade for a while that you were a lot better at getting her off than Karkat was. And you busted your ass to make sure it stayed that way. Since Kar was indirectly responsible for you becoming the self-proclaimed god-king of makin’ whoopee it seems fair that he should reap the benefits gratis. Which gets back to the question – owe him what?

“An OR-GA-SM,” he says in an unnecessarily loud voice, pulling you towards the stairs. You stumble a little before you manage to plant your feet.

“Bullshit,” you pronounce. “I came, you came, and there’s a bucket upstairs to prove it.”

He turns around, looping his arms around your shoulders. Your hands automatically slide into place at his waist, but other than that you don’t move a muscle. The fact that you’re roughly the same height means that there’s a serious risk of headbutting him in the face if you do. You learned that pretty quickly.

“I came _once_ ,” he says reprovingly.

“Most people would be cool with that.”

He huffs. “You’d be mad too if I passed out halfway through morning sex and you had to leave for work with blue balls.”

“Trolls can get blue balls?” you wonder out loud.

He audibly grinds his teeth. “Globes, rotbrain.”

“So let me get this straight… you got your cherry popped, but not your weasel...?” Kar makes a noise that is half frustration, half disgust. “And now you’re mad – at _me_ – because you fucked me into a coma and didn’t get to come as many times as you wanted to. Holy shit, I’ve created a monster.”

Who would’ve thought there could be a downside to having a boyfriend who had two completely different kinds of orgasm? Definitely not Dave Strider.

But you’re ready to roll with it.

His forehead touches yours. You can feel his eyes burning into your head; it’s too bad you can’t see them. “You want a monster? Keep stalling,” he growls.

Lips quirking, you nudge your bodies closer together until you can feel the jut of his sheath under his loose-fitting pants. “I kinda have a thing for monsters,” you tell him.

He makes a noise in the back of his throat and crushes your lips together in a kiss. Your arms snake all the way around his waist to squeeze him as he predictably melts, lips parting for your tongue. His mouth is hot and hungry. Hanging from your neck like you’re his savior, he kisses you like he’s yours, and there’s no part of that that feels like an exaggeration.

Just this, you could do for ages – okay not the neck hanging part, but the touching and kissing and, shit, _grinding_. You could cuddle up on the couch and make out with him like you’re fifteen and his parents won’t be home for hours. It’s crazy how smoothly he slides into your teenage fantasies, how easy it is to imagine fucking him in the backseat of Bro’s truck or skipping class to get lucky in the teachers’ lounge.

It might be ‘cause the whole affair reeks of misbehavior without Jade here to give her blessing.

…Not that you think she won’t be on board, but yeah. You kind of need her to be.

It’s just that those schoolhouse fantasies started out as crude daydreams about banging faceless movie stars or girls way out of your league. You haven’t revisited them in years – not since you fell for Jade, in fact. Jade just wasn’t the kind of person you’d rendezvous with behind the bleachers; you’d have been more worried about making a good impression on her gramps than anything else, you think. Besides, she and her wonderland body gave you something real to fantasize about.

With Kar, it’s the best of both worlds. You hump like teenagers, suck face like you just discovered it, and make love like you’ve been doing it your whole lives. If Jade was the one that grounded you, then Kar reminded you how to fly.

And just when you think you’ve got the hang of it he throws you for a curve. Like this morning, when he straddled you and rode your dick until you come so hard you saw stars. Now you have something new to fantasize about if you ever feel the need to manhandle your… handle? Sure, that works.

Not that you’ve had the itch to crank it for a while. Between your appetite and his, you’ve been sleeping like a baby. That by itself almost makes everything worth it, because your dreams have been pretty fucked up ever since this planet’s hellish sun finished cooking your retinas.

Incidentally, that’s partly how you got here today. Long story short, Karkat broke your best friend’s heart and put a baby in your girlfriend’s belly, and when he’s not touching you, you might as well be dead instead of just being blind. How’s that for a love story?

(What the everloving fuck is wrong with you, dude? Answer: not a damn thing. It’s crazy. It’s awesome. It’s _working_. Jade’ll be ecstatic.)

The neck thing really is a drag, though. You manage to break contact long enough to ask, “Can we take this somewhere else? Like, not in the middle of the hallway?”

Kar twists, getting his bearings, and grabs you by a fistful of shirt. He drags you backwards until you both hit the wall. “Better?” he says as you stick out one arm for balance and lean back. You can’t go too far; he has you by the hips.

“Isn’t there a rule against doing it in the foyer?” You crane your neck to the right, but of course you can’t see the house rules posted by the front door. You honestly don’t have the faintest clue what most of them say. Pretty routine stuff, you think, except for one about playing music too loud that was almost certainly inspired by yours truly.

“Fuck no,” he says decisively. “And that was on purpose.”

“There’s space for it, isn’t there? I think #1 is still blank –”

He interrupts. “The PDA rule was Jade’s thing, but she’s not here to enforce it. Therefore it isn’t a thing.”

“True…” You turn back to face him, bending your arm and letting a little more of your weight rest on his hips. “Besides, it’s not like anyone uses the front door anyway.”

“Mnh. Now you’re talking,” he says, growl rolling into an appeased grumble. He ducks his head a little and presses his lips to the side of your jaw.

You lift your chin, giving him access to your throat. “And you _have_ been waiting all day, it’d be cruel to make you wait the extra 45 seconds it would take to get all the way to my room.” He makes another noise of agreement as his mouth closes on your pulse point. His kisses make a wet trail around your neck that make you shiver as they cool. Hands on your shoulder blades pull you chest to chest, though you’re already huddled in so close you can’t get much closer.

Doing your best to pretend you’re not rock hard, you whisper in his ear. “’Sides, my bedroom doesn’t have a chandelier. You can’t say I never took you anywhere, babe.”

He nips you. “If you’re going to flap your noisemaker then put it on my body first!”

You bust out laughing, burying your face in his shoulder a little too late. The sound rings through the corridor. “Oh god, I have created a monster,” you say, trying hard not to giggle. Suddenly you feel very ticklish. You try to push him away but Karkat yells without taking his mouth off your throat, and that sets you off all over again.

He rears back – at least as much as he can with his back to the wall – and snaps, “I’m glad someone’s enjoying this.”

The urge to laugh dies down. Remembering halfway into the motion that you have to be careful, you cup his cheek, feeling him draw a deep breath as you do. “Aw, babe, don’t be mad.” He doesn’t respond, even when you go in for a kiss. You sigh and nuzzle his cheek instead. “How can I make it up to you?”

Is it your imagination, or does his face feel a little warmer? “I’m sure you can think of something,” he says.

“Yeah, I bet I can.” You smooth your thumb over the velvety skin of his cheek and give him another kiss. He responds more readily this time. You’re sure it probably has nothing to do with having your hand between his legs.

After a few seconds he shifts, making more space for you. You grunt and oblige him, driving him up on his toes and yanking his shirt over his head in one motion.

He remains in that position, back arched off the stone with his wrists tangled in his tee shirt overhead, and tilts his head back. You follow it hungrily, bumping noses and missing his mouth, but then you find it and your tongues meet and it’s perfect. He’s perfect, taut chest and hard belly with its little happy trail disappearing into his pants and his knee sliding up your thigh begging to be hoisted higher. His whole body begging to be fucked.

You don’t need to see him to know how hot he is. You can taste it on his tongue, you can feel it rolling off his body in waves of sweat and cologne.

You don’t think you’ll ever forget how he looked the day that he came and asked you to fuck him. He’s always been shit at hiding his feelings so you really didn’t need Terezi to tell you how bad he had it for you (though she happily did anyway, at every opportunity.) But even she with all her carefully counted warnings couldn’t prepare you for what happened.

You must have been crazy to think you could say yes and still walk away after it was over. It makes you sick to remember how you threw him out of your room because you couldn’t stand the thought that he hated you – that he still hated you – after… something like that.

You told Terezi from the start that you couldn’t sleep with someone you weren’t in love with. But everything was falling apart and he wouldn’t leave you alone and so you talked yourself into something that turned out to be the shittiest, most juvenile thing you’ve ever done. Rose would’ve taken you apart over it if she’d have been alive to see it.

Even so, you don’t regret doing it, only why you did.

It didn’t stop the world from ending, either. Just made you stop caring. If you didn’t have your slightly maimed moirail to worry about, you probably would have skipped forward to autumn when Jade would be home again to make everything better. Rose’s death wouldn’t be so fresh and Kar would’ve been long past being over you. And you could’ve finished going blind in peace.

You’re glad you chose to stick it out. You wouldn’t have wanted to miss this part.

It’s hotter inside than it was outside, and it has nothing to do with the AC and everything to do with your half-naked boyfriend’s body being put on display like a candy shop.

You kiss his face like you can’t get enough, hike his leg up so you can nestle between his legs. You can hear his head thunk back to hit the wall as you move down to his neck. His chest heaves as he pants, shoulders thrown back and arms still crossed above his head. A whine rises in the back of his throat. Do his pants feel a little damp when you press into his crotch?

Imagination or not, there’s no mistaking his moan when you thrust into that gap. His collarbone touches your lips as he surges upward with a strangled noise. But yeah, the stairs are right there, so you cover his mouth before you do it again.

He’s even louder, somehow, with his mouth covered, and after a few more thrusts you realize that if you keep this up you’re going to come in your pants, which is pretty uncool even if he comes too. So you ease up a little, planting shaky kisses along the side of his neck that want to be bites. As you let his leg slip back down, he peels your fingers from his face and gulps for breath, clutching your hand to his chest. You lean hard on his shoulder. You’re exhausted just from the effort of holding back. The pounding of his heart under the palm of your hand steadies you some, cooling you down as it slows.

“Sure you don’t want to go upstairs?” He shakes his head. His body is still moving under yours with a sleepy rhythm. You notice that he avoids any pressure on his bulge aside from the way it’s straining against his jeans. You swallow, dry-mouthed. “Alright, then. I’m gonna need that hand back if I’m gonna be taking your pants off any time soon.”

He gives a dry chuckle. “What, this hand?” he says, removing it from his breastbone. And then he sticks it in his mouth.

Your jaw drops and you squirm a little as his lips close around your first two fingers and he sucks lightly, tongue lolling underneath them. He sweeps it along them, and then over the top, pressing them against his bottom teeth.

“Oh-h-h-okay,” you breathe. His mouth changes shape around your fingers, and you figure out that he’s smirking. “That’s cool. As long as you don’t…”

He draws your fingers out of his mouth with a wet pop. “…Bite down,” you whimper.

His tongue is playing over and around your fingertips, running down the gap between them and teasing them apart. He licks them, from base to tip, and into his mouth they go again. It’s hot and wet and the tip of his tongue is tickling the crease under the first joint and it’s not fair, you’re _throbbing_.

“New plan.” You swallow again. Surprisingly, your mouth’s not dry at all anymore. Okay maybe not a surprise. “ _You_ take off your pants.”

His hands fly off of your wrist as he captures your fingers against the roof of his mouth with his tongue. “Yes, princess,” he snarks around them, but he puts no effort into not sounding ridiculous and his pants are around his ankles within seconds. You grab onto him his arm with your free hand, trying to lower yourself to the ground in a way that doesn’t get your entrapped fingers amputated in the process. Once you’re kneeling at his feet he spits them out again, cradling your hand between his. “Does this mean I need to stop fellating your fingers?” he asks blandly.

“Please don’t,” you tell him, brushing your hand up his thigh and inward to find the base of his sheath. You follow it to its opening, where his bulge juts out like an arrow. A red, wet arrow. You lick your lips and dip your head toward it. “I was kinda getting off on it.”

“Oh really, I didn’t notaahhh. Okay you should do that and I should be quiet now,” he jabbers. You still have to wiggle your fingers at him before he remembers to bend over and put them back in his mouth.

The fluid covering his bulge is similar to the stuff that comes out of his nook, and it tastes about the same, too. The biggest difference is that there’s less of it. The consistency is a little thinner, too; it’s not made for lubrication.

That’s fine. That’s what spit is for, right? So you wrap your fist around it like a candy bar and lick him again. As you explore the head you toy with his shaft, smearing the sheath juice all over your palm and between your fingers. It’s a different shape than a human’s crotch rocket – pointier, sorta? And not quite as thick – but all in all it’s more similar than different.

Not that you’d really know, you guess, seeing as this is the first dick you’ve put in your mouth.

You lick a broader swath across the head. Shuddering, he leans in, choking your wrist. One of his hands finds your hair and tangles in it loosely like he’s not sure if he wants to pet you or just hang on. You fold your mouth around the head of his bulge and let your tongue graze, brushing the thin, taut skin. It’s not as soft as the rest of him, and you just realized you don’t actually know what color it is underneath the red stuff, whether it’s grey too or if his blood shows through the skin.

Your tongue wanders around its circumference, slowly at first, and then more carelessly as Karkat’s tongue writhes around your fingers. This close to his crotch, the air you breathe is hot and heady. You want to strip down and bury yourself inside him so bad.

You inch down his shaft, wetting it. When it’s far enough in your mouth, you let go so you can open your fly. Then you shove your hand down there and touch yourself, just a little. Just enough to get by.

He’s back to fellating your fingers, lips tight around your knuckles. Following his example, you seal your mouth around the base of his dick, bulge, whatever, push him out of your mouth an inch or so and pull him back in, tongue caressing his shaft. It makes him gasp and drop your wrist; voila, now you have two hands to work with. Your left one is pretty busy but your right one is nice and wet and feeling lonely. Kar keens and pets you as you stroke his tight entrance and then slip your fingers into his nook.

You can’t remember the last time you were this turned on. Haha just kidding – it was this morning.

You hardly know what you’re doing at this point, trying to swallow him down, trying not to get ahead of yourself, cupping his globes and feeling his pulse leap against your tongue as he grinds down on your knuckles. Your lover trembles and cries out and your hand moves faster on your cock. Fuck, after this you’re gonna have to take him over the banister after all, there’s no way you’re gonna make it back to your room.

_After what? After he finishes?_

He’s tugging on your hair, begging for you to let him use a bucket, but it’s too late for that, it’s too late to do anything but try not to let him fall on you as his cum floods your mouth.

It’s too much, it’s too sweet. You try to swallow but you choke instead, feeling it dribble down your chin.

You wipe it off with the back of your sleeve as Karkat finishes sliding to the floor with a thump. The bucket rebounds only once before it’s snatched up and captchalogued as quickly as it appeared, and then he starts tugging on his pants, babbling anxiously at you.

“Shit, shit, fuck, Dave, I did _not_ mean to do that! Are you okay? What the hell were you thinking?” he says. He sounds shaken and strangely far away.

You realize you’ve been staring at your dirty sleeve for a few seconds now, trying to tell what color it is and not comprehending why you can’t.

You are blind. _You are blind_. You will never see again, not the pure joy in Jade’s eyes or the desperate longing in Kar’s, not Terezi’s terrifying grin or your brother’s sword flashing in the moonlight, never again. Your eyelashes flutter, blinking back tears of pure, unadulterated self-pity. You’re blind. You have no Rose and no Jade and no shades and your throat is closed so tight you can’t even breathe and you are half a second away from completely losing it and _you are blind_.

To his credit, Karkat’s quick to realize that you’re starting to bluescreen. He wraps his arms around your crumpled ball of limbs. “Stop freaking out, you’re scaring me,” he says. “Here, let me get that.” He dabs at what’s left of the mess on your face. After a few seconds, you draw a shuddering breath and blot your eyes on the upper part of your sleeves. Then you start laughing and burst into tears all over again. Fucking hell, you’re a disaster.

“What’s so funny?” he asks.

You bury your face in his shoulder, laughing wetly. “I don’t want… your pity,” you tell him. His hand freezes on your back. Sniffling, you straighten, mopping at your face. “Sorry. ‘Sa bad joke.”

He relaxes a little. “Yeah, I got that,” he says kindly, brushing away your hair. Then his hand curves around your cheek and he leans in and kisses you, slow and careful. Fuck, the dude is full of valentines today, your heart is fit to bust. _Jade, help._

This is a guy who was nice to you never, up until a month or so ago, when he saw you were struggling and took pity on you for Jade’s sake. And yeah, it’s true, you told him to get lost. Still he kept following you around with his sad puppydog eyes like there was something he could do to help. Maybe there was, maybe there wasn’t, but some catastrophic shit went down between you and it hurt way more than it should have when he went right back to spitting venom like the broken coffee table never happened.

That’s when you knew that something had gone horribly wrong.

You had fallen for him. You fell for the troll who can scowl through more feelings in an hour than some people have their entire lives. You fell for his temper tantrums and sheer fucking intransigence, his big, loud plans and privately hoarded hope. Not to even mention his soulful fucking eyes that give everything away.

You fell in love with someone who desperately wanted you to hate him, which is probably the tagline of a soap opera he would watch the shit out of… so maybe it’s no wonder that he’d be willing to give redrom a go after all.

That’s why it reads like a love letter when he gets all sweet on you. It means that he’s trying like hell because he wants to make this thing work, which is a kind of declaration of love in and of itself. You’re allowed to get butterflies over that.

“Are you ready to get up?” he says, still fussing with your face. You brush his hands away and awkwardly attempt to fix your pants, then sling your arm across his shoulders and let him haul you to your feet.

“Sorry for going all Helen Keller on you there for a second,” you tell him as he leads you to the stairs, arm wrapped tightly around your side. Helen Keller jokes aren’t as funny as your imminently impaired past self thought they’d be, but Kar either hasn’t seen that movie yet or doesn’t care enough to call you out on it.

“What the fuck do you have to be sorry about?” he growls, sounding embarrassed. “I was the one who….“ He bites off the end of that thought, and you imagine him blushing bright red. “Let’s get you upstairs,” he says gruffly.

You wish there was someone here to see this part. To see it for you. This is what you want people to witness, him taking care of you and you… letting him. It’s humongous.

The thing is, it’s okay if he’s the one who sees you fall apart, because for some reason you can’t begin to comprehend, he gets it. Not just you – everything. He gets it and he wants you anyway.

It’s cute and also straight-up ludicrous that he thinks he’s the one who doesn’t deserve this.

Nearing the second floor landing, he slows, looking down the hall. It’s busy and probably well-lit; a door just slammed at the end of the corridor, and you can hear Roxy and John whispering together nearby as they leave the nursery. You clench your fist in the fabric of your soiled sleeve. There’s nowhere to hide it. Do you still have anything on your face? Are they looking over here already? Shit, shit.

“…You want to go up to my room?”

“You read my mind,” you breathe.

The trolls live on the third floor, where they occupy alternating blocks all through one wing of the house in their standoffish Alternian way. It used to be a harem of girls’ voices and snark – perfect company to keep Karkat on his toes – back when Rose was living up here in Kanaya’s garret. Now that Rose is gone and Gamzee’s been exiled to the other end of the house, Terezi’s harsh laughter is the only thing that breaks the silence. It’s dark and unnerving and it apparently suits troll sensibilities to a T.

Once inside, he nudges the door shut and brings you over to the bed. As he ducks his head and loosens your arm from around his neck, you realize that you’ve been hanging on pretty tight and release him with an unsteady laugh. But as soon as he straightens up you lean back into him and tuck your head next to his and just exist there for a minute.

You’ve never been in his room before, but Jade has, plenty of times. This has always been a safe and happy place for her, and you get some of that: the nest-like seclusion of the third floor, with an expectation of privacy that’s so hard to find anywhere else in this house. Even the darkness feels cozy instead of disorienting, though that might be because you’re being hugged by a living furnace. One that smells amazing, at that. Like… you could probably smother yourself in his clothes and die happy.

“Couldn’t wait to drag me back to your den, could you?” you mumble. “Is this where you ravish all of your damsels?”

“This is usually where they ravish me,” he says wryly, tugging at your shirt, “but I can take a hint.”

Your brain shies away from the mental image – it’s still way too complicated to think of him and Jade that way – but once he starts kissing you the problem solves itself.

You feel a welcome rush when you taste his lips, letting his enjoyment of the act itself sweep you along. He has his own unhurried pace, like a hidden current, and it’s so easy to lose yourself in it. You seriously think you could make out with him for days, no joke.

By the time you’re undressed your thirst has been fully reawakened and you have also somehow made it onto the bed. Karkat, seated between your spread knees, pulls you forward all the way to the edge of the mattress. “Is this gonna be okay?” he asks.

You wet your lips and nod. “Yeah, go for it.” As he leans in, you splay your hands over his shoulders, squeezing and kneading the muscle under his smooth skin. Jade always compared troll skin to suede, but it’s a little thinner than that, if just as tough. That plus the firmness of the muscle underneath means your hands will be aching long before you can make a dent. Though it won’t keep your hands off him.

Jesus, he could manhandle you if he wanted to. Your boyfriend is kind of a beast under his shapeless, baggy clothes. Heh.

He strokes your dick lightly with his fingertips before sliding his hands into place around it. Weaving your fingers tightly into his thick, wild hair, you can hear him swallow. Your breath catches in your throat. “Wait,” you tell him. He glances up at you, and it’s your turn to swallow. Your words still comes out hurried and breathy. “If you bite off my dick I’m gonna make you kill me until it grows back, okay.”

He laughs. The richness of it sends a flash of heat through your core. “Do you want me to blow you or not?” he asks. He toys with your white whale (funny ‘cause you’re so pale, otherwise inexcusable) while you struggle for coherence.

“Who taught you to talk like that, holy fuck,” you say, letting your voice tremble as he leans forward and kisses the inside of your thigh. You shift, spreading your legs wider and leaning back on one hand, pulling him closer in the process. The end of your dick glances off his cheek. “If you’ve been talking to my bro about me, we’re going to have to seriously reevaluate this relationship.”

He folds his mouth around you, chuckling, and you can feel the buzz of his throat. You wonder if he did get any tips from Dirk and if so whether that’s actually a bad thing. Gah, not what you should be worried about right now.

Biting your lower lip, you relax your grip on his hair as he nurses you like the last of the summer’s popsicles. There’s no teeth in evidence. It’s funny; a million years ago on the meteor, it never even crossed your mind to let the only other troll you’ve ever dated this close to your junk. Terezi’s built like a sawmill, for one thing, and two she has zero respect for other people’s personal space. On the other hand, Kar’s priorities are pretty much on par with yours regarding your continued ability to bone him. So it’s probably safe to relax.

Craning forward, he takes you little by little until your dick is hitting the back of his throat. You make an involuntary noise and run your fingers through his hair until your wrist accidentally brushes the tip of his horn. You follow it down, circling the bony lip at the base, and he shivers hard between your legs. It makes him whine, his tongue curling against you, then he pulls back, slowly. He presses his wet lips against the head before taking it into his mouth again. Groaning, your hand falls away from his horn as he starts to bob up and down on it. Goddamn it feels good.

After a minute he tosses his head and growls, a wandering, insidious thing that rises from his chest and resonates through the base of his tongue, vibrating against the head of your cock. Moments later you’re gone, coming into his mouth with little more than a shuddering breath passing through your lips. The pleasure ebbs from your body in throbbing pulses, three, four, five.

Without warning, he springs forward, knocking your elbow out from under you and crushing your lips together. The kiss is equal parts wrath and semen.

“Not cool! Ugh!” Your tongue does somersaults in your mouth, trying to get rid of the taste. “Karkat, what the fuck?”

“Next time, _warn me_ ,” he hisses like a pissed-off cockroach. The feral noise makes your heart skip a beat. Shit, is he vacillating on you? Time to de-escalate, pronto.

Holding your breath, you give him a second to simmer down before you lift your hands to his cheeks. A heavy sigh leaves him as his eyelashes flutter against your fingertips.

“I just wanted you to keep touching my horns,” he says in a pained voice.

“Um. Take it as a compliment?”

He answers that with a dismissive snort followed by a faint smile that you find yourself mirroring. Grumbling to himself, he lets you pull him half on top of you after getting yourself more or less lengthwise on the bed.

His weight settles closer with each breath, back subtly shifting and flexing under your hands. His shoulders are solid muscle, but it’s his spine that gets you, an endless undulating ridge that lurks under the surface like a sea monster. There’s just something about the way he’s built that reminds you of cathedrals – not in a choirs-of-angels way but just the spires and arches, the design.

This time you can actually feel the violent shiver travel down his back when you venture to touch his horn. After a little while he turns his head and tucks a hand under his cheek, breath going deep and even. At this rate, you’re not sure if he’s going to start purring or snoring in the next minute.

“So… does that mean there’s going to be a next time?”

He says something into the sheets that sounds like “dickmonger” and climbs off of you to ensconce himself in a pile of blankets on the other side of the bed. Making a displeased noise when you try to join him, he eventually falls asleep curled in an angry, uninviting ball that is three quarters spine and ribs and shoulder blades, so you just stretch your jackass self out across the lumpy mounds of bunched-up covers next to him and hope he’ll forgive you in the morning.

Sometime in the middle of the night he decides to cuddle up with you anyway, knees tucked in the crooks of your legs and breath warming the back of your neck and arms wrapped around your middle like a belt.

* * *

Morning is a soundscape of songbirds, shower pipes, and the shuffling of zombies in the corridors, with Terezi’s unholy racket shot through it like a sour note.

When Karkat gets out of his ablution block you’re waiting for him in all your unwashed bedhead morning breath glory, asking please babe can you find it in your warm, fluffy biscuit to forgive me and also please help me find my clothes?

He kisses you back down to the mattress, his towel untucking itself and sliding off his waist, and you allow yourself a childish grin because you knew he wouldn’t stay mad at you for long. He smells like the kind of spice people used to cross oceans for, goddamn.

“If I tell you where your clothes are then you might leave,” he says, “and if you leave I will be very,” (smooch), “very,” (smack), “disappointed,” (deep cinnamon-y kiss).

You soak in the attention for a moment, mulling over your options. Fuck, you really wish you could find a way to keep him here and make him forget about whatever else he was planning to do today. Maybe try to impregnate him with your tongue while you’re at it. Now there’s an idea.

When you find your voice again you give him your counter-offer: “If you leave me here all day by myself, asshole, I’m going to jizz on your pillow.”

He laughs, his breath huffing past his teeth as he nuzzles your jaw. “I’ll be working on the roof again this afternoon with Gamzee and Dirk, so I won’t be back until late. As long as you’re in my bed when I get back you can do whatever the hell you want in the meantime.”

So that’s how it’s going to be. Well, it’s not like you have anything better to do than to play house. You’re blind, remember?

You wake up again around noon, toying with the idea of recruiting Terezi to bring you breakfast – she usually comes back up to her room after lunch for a cat nap – but you get over it for reasons of pantslessness. There’s an hour sometime in the heat of the afternoon when you get tired of rapping quietly to yourself and start going through his drawers, but all the clothes feel the same to you, and you reluctantly admit to yourself that putting on something of his is tantamount to admitting defeat.

You resist the temptation to follow through on your threat. Instead, you take a long, hot shower and scrub yourself till you shine. Afterwards, feeling lazy and pretty damn lethargic, you throw yourself back into his bed and dream of Jade and her green, green eyes.

At least you still dream in color.

* * *

If Karkat were your alarm clock you’d never be late, because waking up to his soft-lipped kisses is so goddamned pleasant that you’d never want to hit snooze. Also, you’d get to skip the icy where-did-the-world-go panic that greets you most other mornings. Or, in this case, early evening.

You would’ve thought that being blind would get in the way of being in a relationship, but nah. You have to pay attention, sure, but you’re a lot more aware of him because of it. Where he is in relation to you, what he’s thinking about, what kind of mood he’s in… You feel close, not just intimacy-wise, but because you physically _are_ closer since you’re all up in his space lately. And as for him, he’s so in your head that sometimes when you’re with him you forget you’re supposed to be disabled or whatever instead of just, you know. Head over heels.

Still, you wish you could see the subtler expressions he makes… the dark, naked wanting or the searing passion, or even the puppyish adoring looks he gave Jade when he thought you weren’t looking. Those stolen glances used to make you so fucking pissed, but remembering them now fills you with jealousy of an entirely different bent.

You’ve kissed three people in your entire life, not counting that one time when you kissed yourself. For Terezi, makeouts were mostly an exercise in ambush, and they never went anywhere interesting. Jade’s kisses are gifts, affectionate little treasures, but Karkat’s are in joint custody; they already belong to you, he’s just holding on to them. Kissing him feels like coming home.

He awakens you with a kiss like this is your fairy tale romance, which is stupid, because neither one of you is princess material. Jade’s the princess; you and Kar are Disney gone wrong, trying to build a relationship out of whatever you can hang on to. And even though you can’t think of a single reason why your girlfriend wouldn’t want you to keep up this _thing_ you have with Kar, this thing that she started in the first place, you’re still holding your breath.

She better be okay out there. Carousing about the great blue yonder, probably swooping down on every new swatch of color like an ADHD honeybee and not giving a second thought to what’s happening back at home…. She needs to come home stat, even if it means sitting next to her bed feeling more useless than a spoiler on a fucking John Deere while she miscarries all over again. Better for it to happen here than a hundred miles from home.

Anyone who didn’t look closely might think that you care more about Jade’s health than about a kid that isn’t even yours, but that’s a mistake. Jade’s having a baby, damn it. You would love the thing even if you hadn’t fallen for Kar. Even if it turned out to be a toothy little nightmare – which is an even chance anyway, given who its parents are.

“Morning, handsome,” he says when your eyelashes flutter and your hand creeps forward to touch his knee. “I brought you something. Open up.”

He puts his finger on your tongue, coated with something tart and sticky-sweet. You suck it off hungrily. “Fuck yeah! Cherry pie.”

“Cobbler,” he corrects, like there’s a meaningful difference in his mind. Pbbbt. When it’s done right, the only difference is the shape. “Eat up, there’s something new I wanted to try today.”

“Something new? Like what?” He hands you the plate and a fork to eat with. “Like something sexy?”

“ _Eat.”_

Sitting up cross-legged, you demolish it, ice cream and all, congratulating yourself on your luck at landing a boyfriend who turned out to be both sweeter and sexier than you imagined. (That’s right, you have a girlfriend, a boyfriend, _and_ cherry pie, which might as well be manna from the gods. Who’s the king of all creation? It’s you. You are. Now hurry up and finish your pie.)

He tells you first to lie on your stomach. As you make yourself comfortable, resting on your folded arms, you listen to the busy rustling of fabric with anticipation.

His weight settles over your hips, and he leans forward, running his nails lightly down each side of your spine, from the nape of your neck to your tailbone. The sleep-cramped tension begins to melt away immediately.

“I’ll make a troll of you yet,” he imparts as his blunted claws trail symmetrical patterns across your shoulders and sides. “You made a proper pile of my clothes to nap on, do you realize that?”

“Smells like you,” you grumble happily.

He works his thumbs into the notches of your spine, smoothing out the knots and kneading you to a uniform doughiness. Your fingertips begin to tingle as their blood flow is rerouted into the grand capillary reopening that is happening in your back.

“Tell me about your tattoo,” he prompts after a minute.

You groan as he digs his knuckles in the hollows under your shoulder blades. He’s the one who’s been working all day, you should be giving _him_ a backrub. You’re a terrible boyfriend.

“I asked my bro to give me wings. That asshat gave me this atrocity instead.”

You’d told Dirk about the birds that used to roost in your old room, letting him think that was your inspiration. You knew he’d be a dick about it if you let on that you wanted the ink in honor of Davesprite, but in retrospect, maybe if you had told him the truth he would’ve taken it more seriously.

“Okay, but… what is it?” He outlines the image with a nail, raising an angry red line in the shape of a bird’s silhouette. “It’s got _eyes_.”

You flick your wrist dismissively. “It’s a joke. I wanted a crow, he gave me The Crow.”

“The what?”

You twist around to stare at him blankly. Well, to stare in his general vicinity.

“Troll Brandon Lee? ‘Wherein a dude and his girlfriend get brutally and senselessly offed, and said offed dude un-offs himself to avenge her in an atmospheric, lurid revenge fantasy based on the graphic novel of the same name’? The main guy paints himself up like your hellclowns and kills a bunch of people who wronged him. It’s got, like, hemocaste subversion written all over it.” Kar snorts softly. “In fact,” you add after thinking it over for a second, “It probably translates perfectly to the whole bloodthirsty murder justification system you guys had going back home. You sure you haven’t heard of it?”

He leans down, boney elbows resting on your shoulder blades. “Doesn’t really sound like my kind of flick, dude,” he answers gently.

“Yeah, well, no skin off my back if you don’t like it,” you say, throwing a smirk over your shoulder for the lame-ass wordplay. “I was only mad at Dirk for a second anyway. Can’t blame the rat bastard for one-upping me, it’s in his nature. I shoulda known better than to let him at me in the first place.”

Giving a short, humorless laugh, he says, “No shit.” He touches a scarred-in divot between your bottom ribs, awakening the vivid memory of being skewered like a s’more in the making. At least Dirk followed up with the mixed kindness of a swift decapitation instead of waiting for you to go septic.

Only mixed, because the sword in your chest didn’t really hurt until he took it back out – nails on a chalkboard ain’t got nothing on the spine-chilling scrape of blade on bone.

The two of you got into a shouting match when you woke up. He told you in no uncertain terms that you were done strifing, which wasn’t news to you, you’d been telling him that the whole freaking time. So you just… lost it. You went off on him, in the process letting loose some choice words you never had the guts to say to Bro face to face. It wasn’t until the moonlight showed you the cost of his vigil that it struck you that Dirk doesn’t get why you hear a dead man when he talks at you like you’re five.

You like him, for christsakes. He’s actually fucking rad as shit without all of Bro’s cardboard dudebro affectations weighing him down. So what if he shed a manly tear or two over the end of an era, once again out-classing you without really even trying.

It’s not fucking fair. For either of you.

Closing your eyes, you try to pack it in. “Can we talk about something else besides my asshole brother?”

He just leans forward, lipping at your skin tantalizingly. You sigh and fall into a pleasurable silence as he rubs your back, peppering it with open-mouthed kisses that leave cooling patches in their wake. Inching backwards, he slides onto your thighs as he noses the curve of your spine, hands framing your ass like a work of art. You feel a twinge of arousal as your skin switches from ticklish to ravenous without a real transition. You lift your hips slightly and adjust your junk so it’s not crammed against the bed.

The back of his hand brushes your legs, and then he runs the pad of his finger across your skin, leaving a warm, wet trail. He works his way along the length of your body, straightening whenever he re-moistens his fingers, drawing lines that tighten on your skin as they dry. Circling in one eye of your crow, he switches hands to do the other eye, and his fist presses into the bed near your elbow as he delves between his legs again, and you…

You can smell it. That hothouse tang that is pure Karkat and distilled sex, legs locking your bodies together like iron, mouth never satisfied, growl gone strung out and needy, coming apart at your touch. It’s dragging him out of the dining room because you “suddenly remembered about the trees.” It’s breaking in your clean sheets while the last set is still tumbling in the dryer. It’s giving him the release that he begs for so prettily. To hell with pheromones – he doesn’t need any help turning you on.

Halting, his knees tucked against your ribs, he reaches forward to nip delicately at your earlobe, careful not to touch his work before it finishes drying.

“Over,” he says at last, sounding strained, and you flop onto your back eagerly, freeing your trapped erection. He’s so close you can taste him on the air.

He drags his nails lightly down your sides, then pushes back up, smooth palms warm against your stomach, stretching along the length of your torso like a cat. Arching, you try to achieve more contact, but to your agony he hovers just out of reach.

Then he takes your nipple into his mouth, tongue playing over and around it, and you hiss. “Fuck, Kar…”

He makes a low noise as he dips his fingers back into his nook and smears a double stripe across your chest. With all his bare wanting on display, he kisses you, hard and full, and you have to hold on to the bed for dear life to keep your hands to yourself.

“You’re so fucking gorgeous, Dave, I can’t, _fuck_. I wish you could see yourself right now,” he says. His voice is a low, fettered growl.

“Tell me,” you say, mouth dry with thirst. He’s touching you in all the wrong ways, making your body into an erogenous masterpiece while you lose every last ounce of your cool. You need to be against him, inside him, feeling him arch into you as you take him as long and as far as he wants to go. All this tantalizing proximity is only making it more dire.

He makes a quiet noise in his throat. “It’s warpaint,” he says after a moment, like it’s a personal admission. “On Alternia, thousands of years ago, warriors used to paint themselves with the blood of their foes… You could tell who someone was – who they fought for – and how dangerous they were, just by what patterns they wore.”

His fingertips catch and pull your skin as they run dry, and he reaches down to wet them again with a sharp intake of breath. You sincerely hope this is as fucking torturous for him as it is for you.

Taking your hand into his lap, he begins a long coil that wraps tight around your forearm. He resumes speaking in a lighter tone. “The first Condesce put an end to the tradition when she came into power, of course. You can’t romanticize folk heroes because then someone might decide they want to _be_ one, and that obviously can’t happen. Eventually, the paint evolved into something purely ceremonial – a celebration of loyal service.”

His voice grows contemplative as he finishes with a stylized starburst in the center of your hand, radiating out to your fingertips. The symbolism oozes strength and power, and it’s hopelessly misplaced but it turns your stomach inside out anyway.

“I’m glad I lived long enough to see the empire fall before we finish killing ourselves off completely,” he says, leaning back to survey his work critically. Then he says, “It’s done.”

You sit up, searching for his hand, and after a moment it slips into yours, still wet in the crevices between his fingers. You bow your head against his and hear him sigh, imagining his eyes fluttering closed, his naked chest rising and falling with his breath. It hurts to be this close and not be kissing him.

“I’m done fighting, Kar, I told you that. Knights don’t get war paint, they get an unmarked grave. I don’t want that. For either of us.”

He gives a brief, cynical chuckle. “You’re right. Who needs heroes, anyway?”

“We do though,” you insist. He snorts. “Hey. Listen to me,” you say, taking his face in your hands. You want him to swallow your words without spitting them back at you for once. But that’s classic Karkat: you can tell him about himself all day long, but you can’t make him hear.

“Look at what we’ve done since we got here. We built this huge fucking mansion from scratch. We’re feeding ourselves and raising kids and bickering over the stupid fucking _chores_. A year ago we had a wall and a shack, and now we have all of this.” You tilt your head back to indicate the house around you. “We have a future, Kar, together, and none of it would’ve been possible without you. We’d have probably been eaten by sand wolves by now, or whatever Dirk’s griffin thing is. Or we would’ve died of exposure over the winter. But here we are.”

He shakes his head, pulling it out of your hands. “It’s easy to talk about having a future when you know you’re not the last of your kind,” he says, trying not to sound bitter and failing catastrophically.

“Listen, hey. You think since we lost the mother grub we’re just going to sit here and watch you croak one by one? Jade will think of something, it’s her job to figure out this repopulation business, remember? There’s gotta be cloning equipment _somewhere_ that still works, and even if it doesn’t she’ll bring it back here and mess with it until it does. She’s not letting anybody die out on her watch. Okay?”

Nothing. “Okay?” you repeat, insistently.

He’s silent. He doesn’t want you touching his face. What now? You lean forward, hands on your knees, and try to read his mind.

“There’s a gap,” he says finally, with heartbreaking pain in his voice. “There’s a hole where she used to live, like an empty room you can’t stand to look at anymore, so you close the door. But every time you walk by you have to check to see if she’s still gone...

“Gamzee doesn’t mind it so much, he likes the quiet, and I’m scared to bring it up with Kanaya,” he continues. “I guess there’s Terezi, but she’s used to having voices in her head so she’d probably just laugh at me. If Jade were here, I could talk to her about it…” The further in he gets, the worse he sounds. “I mean, I miss her like crazy, but not like this. Even my custodian got to live on for a while as a sprite. Nepeta, Eridan… well, Eridan was an asshole and he deserved what he got, but...”

He trails off. It sounded like he was starting to get choked up. Is he crying? He’s quiet long enough that you almost think he’s done, but then he says, in a thick voice, “That day, when I came to, it was like waking up from surgery missing part of me that I was supposed to keep. It just… I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s like she was cut out.”

You lift your hand, but he makes no move to take it, and you let it fall. “I never got to talk to the mother grub,” you tell him. “Every time I got close, I got a splitting headache.”

“I know,” Kar says stuffily. You turn your head away in shame. Jesus fucking christ, even talking about Rose would’ve been better than this. At least you would have something to say, even if it wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

“Do you want to… tell me about her? Or, I dunno….” You trail off, lost. She was just a slimy, noisy little larva to you. Between her psychic commotion and the thunderous pain it set off in your temple, you wouldn’t have even known she was capable of conversation if not for Terezi.

But your moirail didn’t talk about the mother grub that much, either. It was just a troll thing. You could either understand her or you couldn’t.

You scoot in closer, thinking maybe he might want a hug or something. If you can get him to lie down and talk to you this evening might even be salvageable.

The war paint tugs enticingly when you move. God, you just want to touch him... If you could touch him then everything would be okay.

Instead, he pulls away. It hits your stomach like a sucker punch.

“You don’t understand,” he says bitterly. “It’s not about _survival_. I already know I’m not going to _survive_ , I just… What’s it for? We’re going to eat ourselves alive if we don’t do something about Gamzee. Kanaya’s deranged, and I can’t even bring myself to hold a conversation with Terezi three-quarters of the time… we had all these pails, and we… I thought we were… I thought we had a shot, but it’s all falling apart, and I can’t stand that Jade’s not _here_ because I feel like tiniest thing could bring us to our knees.”

“Jade’s coming back,” is the only think you can think of to say.

“ _When?_ Before someone else dies?” He laughs humorlessly; you can hear him pacing, back and forth.

“Who’s gonna die?” you ask, skeptical. You pull yourself to the edge of the bed and swing your legs over the side, but for some reason the fact that he can see just fine and you can’t is making you self-conscious. Instead of standing, you pull a sheet over your lap.

“Me!” he barks. (“Yeah, right,” you scoff under your breath. If trolls could drop dead from stress, he’d be dead already.) “Fuck! What about _Jade?_ Jade’s baby? Hell, what about Jane’s baby?”

“Woah now,” you tell him. “Jane’s rocking this pregnancy thing, don’t jinx it.”

“ _I don’t fucking know how babies work!_ ” he shouts, resuming his pacing, which sounds more like stomping now. “Fuck! If Rose were alive she would know what to do…”

Back to Rose. Deflect, deflect. “Have you _tried_ talking to Terezi?” you ask cautiously.

“I don’t trust Terezi,” Karkat says. You sit up a little straighter since this is kinda your territory. “Listen, I’m glad she let Gamzee go, but do you really think it was the right thing to do? He’s killed four people now, and we know for a fact – thanks to you! – that he would have killed Jade if he had the chance. Is that worth the risk? What if she’s the trigger, is he going to flip his shit again as soon as he sees her?”

“He’s not gonna.” _Or if he does, the girls will take care of him. For good this time._ But you don’t say that out loud.

“How can you know that??”

“Terezi would’ve seen it, dude. Do you remember when she freaked out after Roxy left?”

“Sure, okay, she saw it coming, but did she do anything to stop it?!”

“She did what she could,” you tell him, impassive on the surface, but grinding your teeth, just a little. _(So did I. Rose, on the other hand... sigh.)_ “Terezi saved your life, Kar. Give her a little credit.”

 _“Why?”_ Karkat asks with terrible resentment in his voice. He closes the distance between you and repeats it. “You’re her moirail, tell me. Why did she save me, Dave?”

“I don’t know, maybe she thought you were _important?_ ” you say, starting to get a little irritated with his bottomless negativity. “Maybe if you gave her back her specibus, she’d tell you!”

You know you hit a nerve when he leans in, snarling, after an unnerving few moments of silence. “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he spits, breath hot on your face, and throws himself across the room to rummage through his clothes. You can hear him zipping himself into a pair of pants before he stomps back your way.

“You can tell Terezi that she can have her specibus back over my dead body,” he says roughly as he passes you.

“What am I, Switzerland? _You_ tell her that!” you yell back at him. You’re on your feet, but since you’re wearing nothing but a sheet and some excess bodily fluids, you’re not gonna try to chase him around the room. “Don’t be a dick, let’s talk about this! Where’re you going?”

His words come out muffled by a layer of fabric as he tugs a shirt down over his head. “Somewhere to cool down,” he says, and then he slams the door behind him.

You scrub at your goosebumps and sit back down on the bed. _Fuuuckk_. Of all of Karkat’s hot buttons, an ancient beef with his ex-girlfriend was not actually one of the ones you were worried about leaning on by accident. The breakup was almost a year ago, for one thing. If someone had asked you to describe their post-relationship relationship in one word you would’ve gone with “professional,” for lack of either warmth or, like, ongoing hostilities. It’s not an active warzone by any stretch of the imagination.

That fucking stapler, though. You didn’t ask your moirail why she saved him that day; that seemed pretty self-explanatory. She was doing her job, trying to mitigate the damage, just like you were.

No, what you asked her was “Do you still love him?”

She laughed and said no, of course not, which you took to mean that she might actually be sincere about trying to get you to hook up with him (it’s hard to tell, with Terezi.) Point is, she obviously still cares about him, but it seems like the harmless “go, be free” kind, not the “hold still while I enact my elaborate and nebulous revenge” kind.

You’re not getting a “go, be free” vibe from Karkat. You thought he dumped Terezi during the fallout over Jade’s kissyface antics, but come to think of it, they started fighting way before Jade made a move on him… Huh. Maybe Jade has the scoop.

Even if she doesn’t, you’re not going to be bringing it up with either of your troll-mates again any time soon. Whatever grudge Kar’s still holding against your moirail is none of your business, especially if it’s as one-sided as it sounds.

You briefly toy with the idea of pulling on some pants to go after him. Then you consider just going as you are, painted in tribal scarlet and reeking of sexy troll pheromones or whatever.

But what if you’re pounding on Gamzee’s door and you get no response, or worse, what if he actually answers? What if he says that Kar doesn’t want to see you? What if he decides that a soft, flimsy human like you is unfit to date a troll after all? You saw what he did to your doomed clone – he didn’t just break your neck, he _crushed_ it, vertebrae shattering like glass with the force of his grip.

You’re dating his moirail and, uh, moirailing his kismesis. Yeah, maybe you should just stay away from him and his ragey thing, like, forever.

So instead of chasing Karkat down you once again resign yourself to jizzing on his sheets, but you never actually get around to it and end up moping yourself to sleep with one hand on your dick and the other clutching his pillow like a lifeline.

He doesn’t come back the next morning. You only get up to drink some tap water out of your cupped hands, then throw yourself back in bed, ignoring the grit flaking off your skin. Your resentment grows as the day lengthens, but it’s not because you’re actually mad at him for walking out. Mostly you’re pissed off at yourself. The specibus thing was a low blow, you knew that as soon as you said it.

Here’s the thing. He’s spent years trying to understand human culture and you spent those same years strip mining his for ridicule fodder. Now you’re sleeping in this lovely bed you made and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that you can’t wiggle your little toe without getting stabbed by one of the zillion zingers you planted. It’s all he can do to keep himself from vacillating on you when you’re practically asking for it three-quarters of the time. It wouldn’t kill you to make an effort, is what you’re saying.

Most of your resentment is because you know you’ll end up apologizing whether it was your fault or not. Because this… this is too good to let go.

By the time he returns, you’re ready to tell him anything. You’ll stay up all night talking if you have to. You’ll stay up _listening_ , that’s how much you want to make this right. You like Karkat Vantas and you’re not afraid to tell him so, loudly and repeatedly if necessary, and finesse be damned.

You hear the door creak hesitantly open, and he says your name like he can’t believe you’re still here. “You’re back,” you greet him, yawning. Sitting up, you push away piles of clothes, clearing some space for him on the bed.

The bedsprings creak in protest as he comes to sit beside you. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey, babe,” you answer, hands folded in your lap. Your voice sounds terrible, rusty and unused, and you find yourself wishing you had brushed your teeth or done anything else productive today. Slumping a little, you summon the most humble/sheepish facial expression in your repertoire. It isn’t much, but it’s something.

He lays his hand on yours. You take it without thinking, leaning forward, nestling into his shoulder. Even through his clothes, he’s so warm.

“I don’t know if you already ate… I brought some dessert up, if you want it,” he says.

Come to think of it, you’re starving. “Yeah, I could go for some dessert. Gimme,” you tell him, and open your mouth. He snorts softly and feeds you a spoonful of something sweet and creamy and delicious. It tastes like pudding, not a flavor you recognize, but there’s whipped cream and some kind of crumbly, nutty crust there too.

“You can leave if you want to,” he says as he scoops up a second bite and hands it to you. “I wasn’t intending to keep you here against your will or anything.”

Your mouth curves around the spoon. You drop it into your hand and dip your head, smirking, as you drum it against your shin like a pen. “Dunno, babe, I was kind of liking being kept.” You flick your eyes in his direction under the fringe of your hair.

“Even… even after yesterday?” he says hesitantly. “Look, Dave, I was thinking…”

Rolling your eyes, you say, “Was I not fluttering my eyelashes hard enough or something? How about now?”

“Stop it, you look like you’re having a seizure.”

“You look like a fart in the dark, but do you hear me complaining?”

“I’m serious, Dave,” he says, annoyed.

You shake your head. “Look, I know what you were thinking, and it’s bullshit, alright? I know you think you’re gonna vacillate by accident and scare me away but _it’s not a valid reason to stop_. Okay? Look, everybody fights sometimes. Just don’t fucking bite me, Kanaya made me get stitches last time and I don’t know if you’ve ever needed stitches on the inside of your lip but they’re the _worst_ , they get in the way of everything.”

“No biting,” he says, audibly relieved. “I promise. You want some more of this stuff?”

You lift your chin. “Only if you kiss me first.”

He does, soft and sweet, his hand on your knee. You’re almost disappointed when he pulls away, plucking the spoon out of your hand, but you let him feed you the rest of the pudding. After he scrapes up the last of the whipped cream, you take the plate and spoon from him and lean past him to put them on the corner of the dresser. Then you flop down on the bed. He repositions himself so you can stretch out and lay your head in his lap without even asking.

You don’t need to tell him how much you need familiar contact, cut off from the world as you are. Somehow he already knows.

“Can I ask you something?” he says, bowing over you, his fingers running through your hair.

“Mm.” You open your eyes as he brushes a stray lock away from your face. “What?”

“Why did you stay? I mean, at some point you must have figured out I wasn’t coming back.”

“Where else was I gonna go? You think Terezi wants to put my sorry ass up?”

“She would,” he says. “She’s your moirail, it’s kind of her job.” He continues stroking your hair as you lie there, blinking, trying to figure out what he wants you to say.

“Are you avoiding her?” he probes.

“Not her so much as… everybody? The whole house keeps trying to throw me a pity party, and I’m sick to death of it. Not to mention that every single one of them has some quack advice they’re just dying to give me.” It’s true; you’ve basically spent the last two days hiding from the mountainous swell of sympathy that coincided with the shock of the wedding beginning to wear off. Not the worst thing in the world, but still cumulatively exhausting. Even Terezi gets to be too much sometimes. Okay, a lot of the time. “I just needed a break, I guess.”

“I know Dirk’s been worried about you. He’s been asking about you every day.”

Irritated, you scoff. “He’s the worst one of all. Tell that prick it’s none of his business and he can shove off. Or better yet – remind him what happened to the last person who thought she could protect me from myself.”

“Dave,” he says, all patient and well-rehearsed, “no one blames you for that. Rose –“

“– Would still be alive if it wasn’t for me. Isn’t that what you said?”

“Don’t tell me you believe that!” he sputters. “Nobody else does!”

“Do you?”

“Of course not!”

“Right,” you say, rolling your eyes. “Next you’re gonna tell me you don’t love me for my dick.”

“Well. Not _only_ for your dick.”

You crane your chin up at him. “Wow, really? That was fast, I thought I was going to have to drag it out of you.”

Exasperated, he says, “Dave, you went out of your way to demonstrate how good you are in bed. Don’t pretend like you _didn’t expect me to notice or care._ ”

You crack a grin. He’s probably glaring at you, haha. “Flattery will get you everywhere, babe. I’m not even mad. Knowing how to lay down the night moves is, like, my only redeeming feature.” Quirking your eyebrow, you throw in, “Speaking of redemption… you’ve got a stack of ‘one free boning’ coupons that are begging for it.” Especially after yesterday’s misadventure. You’re dying to know what he had in mind for after the warpaint.

“Mmm. Tempting… very tempting.” He falls silent, hand stilling in your hair.

“…You better be fantasizing about my hot bod over there.”

He gives a soft chuckle. “No, sorry. Actually, I was thinking about Rose.”

“Wow, fantasizing about my dead twin sister’s hot bod?” You glare up at him as best as you can. “Are you a professional boner assassin or did you just kind of stumble into it one day?”

“I can’t tell if you’re accusing me of a body horror fetish or necrophilia, but either way the answer is a resounding ‘fuck no.’ Hear me out, though. She was more horrorterror than not when she melted into that swamp, right? Are we sure she’s really dead? Maybe she just… transcended, somehow? And what happened on the solstice was, like… her final audition.”

“Are you saying she committed apotheosis and left us to clean up the mess? I wouldn’t put it past her, wrecking shit is like 90% of her resume. But damn, I’d hate to be Kanaya if that was true.” You’d hate to be Kanaya in general right now, but… jesus, that’s cold.

“Yeah,” Karkat says. “Poor Kanaya.” He sounds bummed out now. You know they used to be friends. They probably still would be, if she hadn’t thrown him under a bus during Gamzee’s trial. Still, you bet he doesn’t blame her for it; it’s got to suck being the one left behind.

“You Derse dreamers have a thing for martyrdom,” he says. “Promise you won’t do anything like that to me.”

“Uh… dude, I’m not suicidal. Besides, making sure it sticks takes a little more foresight than I’m usually known for.”

Leaning across your prone form, he prods the scar Dirk gave you – the entry wound, this time. “Not actively suicidal, you mean. Not particularly risk-averse either.” The accusation in his voice is faint, but recognizable.

You frown. “I _hate_ dying, but sometimes you don’t have a choice.”

“That’s true,” he says quietly. “But if… when Jade comes back, she’s going to need a lot of help. So, just… keep that in mind, okay?”

“Are you worried she won’t make it back?”

“A little bit… aren’t you?”

“’Course not. If something happens and she needs a hand, or medical attention or whatever, she’ll just zap herself back.”

He makes an unintelligible noise and bends almost double, pressing a kiss to your lips. Wrapping your arms around his neck, you make sure he sticks around for a couple more. After he manages to untangle himself, he says, “I’m so glad to hear you say that,” and gives a shaky laugh. “This whole time, I was afraid that the only reason you wanted to be with me is because you thought she might not be coming back at all.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes I think you’re only with me because you don’t realize how replaceable I am, what with three-quarters of us packing some form of bone bulge apparatus.”

“Idiot,” he snorts. “I’m your slut, remember? Why would I want anybody else’s bulge when I have 24/7 access to yours?”

“Look, hey –“ You try to sit up but only succeed in smacking him in the forehead before he pins you back down, leaning most of his weight on your shoulders to keep you from doing something that stupid again. “I know that word looks all sad and lonely lying in the street with its runny mascara, Kar, but just because somebody threw it at you doesn’t mean you have to keep it. Some words were never meant to leave the gutter they were born in.”

He clicks his tongue. “Too late, it’s my word now. I married it and bought it a hive in the nice end of the gutter and it always has grubloaf on the table when I get home from gutter town hall. We’re expecting our first gutter baby any day now. It’ll either be called ‘Karslut’ or ‘Slutkat’ depending on whether it’s a boy or a girl.”

Groaning, you cover your face with both hands. “Jade’s gonna kill me for teaching you that word.”

He bends over you; you imagine him blinking his thick, dark lashes. “Fine,” he says. “I guess I’ll leave my wife and gutter baby and come live with you and Jade in the ‘burbs.”

You sigh. “Jade would never let you abandon your gutter baby. Tell you what, why don’t we all move out to the gutter together and give your gutter baby the life she deserves.”

“Great. We’ll be one big gutter family.”

“Aren’t we already?”

A deep breath leaves his chest, and he nuzzles you, the warm air caressing your cheek. “Love you, Dave,” he says.

“Yeah you do.” He topples over on his side, scrunching himself into a C shape so he can lounge on your chest while your head is still pillowed on his thigh. You can sense him watching you, chin propped on his folded arms.

“…You know what I think?”

“Hmm,” he says.

“I think you never actually hated me at all.”

A few long, even breaths fill the pause before he responds. “I could have,” he says. “I wanted to, but you didn’t want to cooperate.”

“Do you still wish for that? For me to hate you?”

“Not at all. I wish I had a kismesis… I feel like I missed my chance. But I’m glad it’s not you. This is so much better.” After a long pause, he adds, “I’ll never regret letting myself have this. Even if it ends tomorrow… it was worth it.”

You touch his arm, following it down to his hand and wrapping your fingers around it. He squeezes back hard, and you find yourself smiling. “It wasn’t a matter of letting myself,” you tell him with a short laugh. “It was a matter of how long it was going to take me to do something about it.”

“I’m glad you didn’t wait too long.” There’s a smile in his voice, too.

“You can thank Terezi for that.”

“Mm… How about you thank her for me,” he says.

This is nice, curling up together and talking like this. It reminds you of that first night with Jade on the meteor, lying on the couch with her, catching up. Thinking about kissing her but happy just to listen… to be there with her. Even in tears she was so much more beautiful than you’d remembered.

She knew exactly what she was doing. You followed her lead that day and you’ve been following it ever since, and love has never been so right or so easy.

Now here you are, in bed with her lover. You guess she brought you here too. It hasn’t been as easy, being with Kar… but just like Jade, it feels so right.

You adjust your grip for something less cramped, where your hand won’t fall as soon as he lets go of it. Sleep snuck up on you; you’re nearly there.

“What do you think your sister’s doing right now?” he asks after a minute.

“Negotiating cease-fires,” you mumble. “Running for Outer Ring Senate.” A yawn cracks your jaw.

“I can see that,” he says, and stretches out across your abdomen, now draped more on his stomach than on his side. He stuffs a pillow in the gap against your leg, further exacerbating the greenhouse effect of having a feverishly hot troll on top of you.

“G’night, Kar,” you manage, succumbing to another yawn.

He pulls your hand to his lips and kisses it, smile curving against your fingers. “Sweet dreams.”

* * *

For the first time probably ever, you wake up before he does, carefully dislodging him and jumping into the shower before his alarm goes off. His ablution block is a mirror image of yours, and it’s not hard navigate, though it does take a tedious amount of fumbling to figure out which bottle is the shampoo (based on the smell you’re 99% sure that at least some of these are Jade’s.)

The last of the war paint is a gummy residue under your fingernails when the curtain slides aside and he joins you under the spray.

He hooks a chin over your shoulder, sucking at the beads of water clinging to your skin, and you press your cheek against his burning hot flesh and close your eyes, letting him run his hands over your body. You breathe deeply in his arms as the water washes away your drowsiness.

“Kar,” you murmur, leaning into him as you give him your neck. His lips are soft and warm over his unforgiving fangs, but he only teases, never quite bites down, as he promised.

His hands slide down to brace you by the points of your hips. His bone bulge isn’t out, but he grinds against you anyway, sheath jutting against your ass. Your head tips back as you take one horn to hang on to, feeling each slow wave build in his abdomen and travel to his quads as it rolls insistently against you. You brush your half-hard dick with the backs of your fingers, groaning.

“No,” he says, pulling your hand away. You nip his earlobe in retaliation even as you pretty much surrender to his will, filling your lungs each time he returns, forcing yourself not to try to take over.

You’re so lost in him, his smell and the velvet of his smoldering skin and the way he’s driving you up onto your toes, that it genuinely takes you by surprise when a soapy finger circles your anus. Your eyes shoot open.

“Relax,” he says, sounding vaguely exasperated. You bite his ear again, harder this time. As he pushes in, you grit your teeth and try to do as he said.

He senses your distress and stops, crooking his finger while you concentrate on your breathing. After a minute, he asks, “Better?” and you nod tightly.

You try not to think about what it feels like because if you do you might back out, and for some reason you really, really want to do this for him. You must be insane.

He resoaps and presses in again, more slowly, and it’s better this time, smoother. He keeps going until his knuckles are flush against your skin, necking you tenderly the whole time. You can feel your pulse racing against his lips as he sucks – briefly, but hard enough to bruise.

Even if he doesn’t bite down, your throat will be pink and raw for hours. You used to hate how eggshell-thin your skin was, but it doesn’t bother you as much as it used to. You’re already a joke; might as well own it. Besides, it’ll give them something to fuss over besides your eyes for once.

Instead of working his finger in and out, he twirls it in deliberate circles like he’s practicing cursive. This far in it just feels weird more than anything else, but the movement is mirrored by the tip of his tongue on your skin.

The feeling of stretch intensifies as he slowly pulls out, still making slow circles. All in all, it’s a million times better than having a dick shoved up your ass and hoping you’ll get used to it, which is kind of how you imagined this going if you were being totally honest with yourself.

By the time he gets down to one joint you’re thinking about taking a second finger, but you never recover enough of your voice to ask before he replaces it with his thumb instead.

It’s not only thicker, but the angle’s completely different, too. His two middle fingers press into your taint, forming a U-shape with his thumb in your ass, and the combined pressure somehow goes straight to your dick. Though he tries to stabilize you a little with his knee, within a minute or two the only thing keeping you upright is your deathgrip on his horn.

With your head lolling back on his shoulder, you cry out unintelligibly as his hand closes around your throbbing cock. His voice reaches your ear as an affectionate growl, telling you how good you are, Dave, how proud he is of you and how wonderful you are, so perfect, Dave, so good.

It’s too much. The shower’s getting cold but he’s a fucking firebrand and even if he didn’t have his hands all over you the fuzzy little encouragements he’s murmuring into your shoulder would keep you warm year round.

When you find your way back, he’s practically cradling you so you won’t fall and break a leg over the side of the tub. You feel a stab of guilt. Not for using up the hot water, but (way worse in your book) for letting him get you off without returning the favor. You pull yourself shakily to your feet while you search out his face, needing some tangible indication of his state of mind because you don’t trust your own voice right now to ask what he needs.

His eyelashes tickle your fingertips as he peels off your hands – laying a fluttering kiss on your palm, because you aren’t woozy enough already – and helps you out of the trap without saying a thing.

You’re sprawled across his bed pretending to sleep when he comes out, gets dressed, drops a quick kiss on your cheek, and leaves for work. He probably wasn’t fooled in the least, but you’re glad he decided to play along because you really need some time to think.

And by ‘think’ you mean avoid dealing with what just happened at all costs.

Is that what he’s been doing up on the roof with Dirk and Gamzee every afternoon for the last couple of weeks? Getting himself schoolfed on How To Gay Sex? Is that the big stinking “secret project” he’s been working on?

Surely not… but the thought of him discussing your butt candidly with either of them in any context is enough to make you want your mind bleached.

Flopping over to the edge of the bed, you rummage through the top drawer of Karkat’s desk until you find a pad of paper and a writing utensil that feels and smells like a crayon. You hope it’s cherry red – the better to get your moirail’s attention.

help

im being held hostage

bring sandwiches

The lines aren’t going to be straight, but as long as the color’s bright enough she should be able to figure it out.

You stick your head out the door, listening intently for signs of life, but everyone’s gone downstairs for breakfast. Ducking across the hall (feeling like a glow-in-the-dark target in your pasty white skin, you should’ve put on a towel or something), you slip the note under the second door to the left and creep back into Karkat’s room with hardly a sound.

You pretty much pass out as soon as your head hits the pillow.

* * *

“The afterlife isn’t what it used to be,” Rose says. You blink, startled.

“Is that what this is?” You’re on a boat, little more than a skiff, sailing through the dark under a blanket of stars, arms folded as you recline against the mast. You can feel the wood creaking against your back.

“No,” she says. “Not for you.”

“But it is for you?”

She’s quiet. A cool draft fills the sails. It’s a nice change from the dog days of summer.

“That’s how you always got away with it, isn’t it? Hiding big lies behind little truths. How am I supposed to know if it’s really you?”

“Who else would it be?” she says, amused.

“Brain Rose, obviously. Real Rose would have brought up Karkat by now.”

“Shouldn’t it be the other way around?” You can hear her eyes shining in the dark, lips quirking around the edges. “If I were a figment of your imagination, I would already have known you wanted to talk about him. I could’ve expedited the process for you.”

“Wrong. I don’t want to talk about Karkat. That’s why you didn’t start talking about him until I did. Real Rose would have pounced immediately on such a tempting topic, ergo you must be fake.”

“Unless I was waiting to see how long it would take you to bring him up. Which, for the record, was less than two minutes into this dream,” she laughs. “What exactly is it that you’re afraid I’d ask about?”

“Awkward stuff that my sister has no business knowing about my sex life, obviously. Like whether I actually fell in love with _him_ , or did I just slot him into Jade’s spot out of some sick desire to feel wanted in her absence?”

“Interesting question. What do you think, Dave?”

You snort quietly. “I haven’t replaced Jade with a temperamental sexpot, if that’s what you’re getting at. If anything, I’m the one that’s plagiarizing _her._ But I don’t see how it makes a difference. I don’t _not_ love him, so why does the rest of it matter?”

“Why indeed,” she says mock-solemnly. “Have you considered that embarking on a new relationship at such a fraught juncture might be a coping mechanism? A means of distracting yourself from your woes?”

“See above re: what difference does it make, and also I’d appreciate it if you’d take the phrase ‘coping mechanism’ and any other psychobabble you have lurking under your tongue and kindly hock it into the nearest dream latrine. Thanks in advance.”

“I suppose that means you’re not open to a discussion of the roles that cognitive dissonance and learned helplessness have played in the construction of your self-image.”

“Nope. In fact, every single one of those words is banned from this conversation, Rose, and that’s ten demerits for you. I can and will hand-deliver your red card to the Furthest Ring.”

“You make house calls now?” she exclaims, managing to pull off teasing and delight at the same time. “How sweet, _mon frère_ , I didn’t know you cared.”

You lift your head, trying to catch sight of her face. Light reflecting off the rippling water casts fluid shadows across her form that are merely unsettling at first. But when you tilt your head to try to get a better look…. It almost seems like it’s her _skin_ that’s crawling under the dancing lights. Her eyes alone are fixed points, cold and bright as diamonds.

“…I don’t get it, Rose,” you tell her, closing your eyes against a wave of nausea. Trying to focus on the parts of her that are still human is giving you a headache.

She crouches down across from you so she doesn’t have to talk so loud over the boat’s creaking. “Get what?” she says innocently.

“Well I do, I guess kinda, I get why you wanted to get it over with, there’s nothing shittier than waiting for the axe to fall when you already know exactly how it’s gonna happen. I get why you walked into it – I mean I’ve done that too, showed up to my own death all pretending to be surprised and shit when I bought it just like I knew I was going to.”

You crack your eyes open to see your sister listening to you ramble with her forearms crossed on top of her neatly folded knees, wedding dress poofed up around her like a marshmallow. Silvery nails capture the little light there is near the bottom of the boat; the rest of her body is shadowy against the pale fabric.

Her expression is the picture of patience. It’s nice, it’s… familiar. It helps you reel it in, some.

You take a deep breath or two and then make the plunge.

“What I don’t get,” you force out, voice straining the definition of neutral, “is what the fuck you thought you were doing to Kanaya.”

She tilts her head and hums thoughtfully. “I suppose I could have broken up with her – is that what you mean? Put off the wedding for a century or two, bought myself some time… but it would’ve been purely selfish on my part. I much prefer the thought that we spent our brief time together in nearlywedded bliss instead of weathering decades of perfectly preventable misery.”

“You don’t think dying was selfish, Rose? You don’t think picking your demons over your, your _soulmate_ was selfish? You could have prepared her, or left her a note, or done basically anything except what you chose to do, which was to martyr yourself in the gaudiest way you could come up with, right in front of her eyes. What did you think was gonna happen? She’s not heartbroken, she’s _homicidal.”_

Rose clicks her tongue softly. “I’ll admit that the situation was less than ideal – for one thing, warning her was never an option. I took some liberties with the plan, it’s true, but none that would endanger the outcome....” She reaches over her head to tuck a few stray hairs back under her headband without fully looking at you. “Frankly, I do regret what she must be going through right now,” she says, sounding wistful. “I hope it passes quickly.”

You’re shaking your head in honest-to-god disbelief before she’s even done speaking. “You let her think she was marrying the love of her life and that’s all you can say? ‘You hope it passes quickly’? Damn. I always knew you ran cold, but this is unreal. Even I’m beginning to hate you, Dream Ghost Rose, and I’m the chump who couldn’t hate the guy that knocked up my girlfriend if I tried. Jesus, Rose, I don’t even hate _Dirk_ , even after goring me, and you know why?” You’re staring at her; she’s rippling like a flag in the wind, and she won’t meet your eyes. “Even though he’s an inveterate approval-seeking troll, he doesn’t _want_ to be. That’s the difference between you and him. He’s just too proud to admit that he’s wrong, but you? You’re above reproach. Well, let me be the first to tell you that that’s horseshit. Welcome to the Land of Dave’s Actual Shit List, sis, your coronation’s at noon but don’t expect anyone else to show up because you’re the only soul for miles.”

Her arms have drifted down to hug her knees. She looks down at her knees she speaks, voice soft. “Being hated was also part of the plan. I cast aside everything except the part of me she loathed because she needed to see me embrace my fall. You see, in the years to come…” She draws a shuddery breath. “In the years to come, hate will warm her heart longer than love ever could.”

You stare at her blurry mess, burning with muted disgust. It’s almost like seeing her through a lens of tears, but she’s the one crying, not you. Dream logic.

“The long view is the only one I can see,” she whispers.

You refuse to be moved by the anguish in her voice. She doesn’t deserve your pity, or anyone else’s, for that matter….

Aw, hell. Stupid pump biscuit getting all soggy over a couple of tears.

Sighing, you stand and walk four steps on rubbery legs before you drop down beside her and squeeze in side by side. Her arm is cold to the touch. It reminds you of the time she needed a blood transfusion, how cold and grey her skin was by the time Kanaya managed to get a needle into your vein (you were her first medical procedure, lucky you.) You don’t pull away from her frigid touch because, you know, solidarity.

“I hope it was worth it, at least.”

She lifts her head and meets your gaze through a film of tears. “It will be,” she says. “Just… perhaps not right now.”

For just a second, there was something in her eyes that you recognized as Rose, but she blinked and it swam away. She’s still rippling, somehow, even though the boat’s sides should be blocking the reflection of the water. So it’s just her, then. Ugh, you feel sick.

You look up, squinting through your shades at the lights overhead. There’s something not right about them. You cock your head just a little to watch them out of the corner of your eye. Is it just the seasickness, or are they crawling now too?

“My dreams have been getting weirder.”

Sniffing, she wipes her eyes and sits up a little. Her laugh is half sob. “Your brain is getting used to the lack of visual stimulus. Neurons continue to fire even in the absence of input, and the mind still wants to interpret those pulses as information.” She pats your arm sympathetically, nails glinting like knives in the darkness. “Dreams are how the mind defrags,” she says.

“Are you saying they’ll go away?”

“No. But you’ll get used to it.” She gives another sniffle and a crinkle-eyed little smile.

Your sigh is swallowed by the lapping of water against the hull. “Where are we going, anyway?”

“It’s your dream, Dave. You tell me.”

“We’re going to see Jade,” you decide. “The real one.” That was what you were hoping for, anyway. It seems like you spend all your time looking for her these days. Maybe today is the day.

“Are you sure?” Rose says. “It’s daytime. You’re probably the only one asleep right now.”

The way the stars are moving against the heavens clicks in your head, and you lurch out of your crouch to touch one. It pulls away from the rock, slimy and wriggling, and it glows fluorescent blue through your fingers. Gross, but cool.

“We’re in a cave,” you tell her, like she doesn’t already know. Even if it is your dream it’s sure as hell not your memory.

“Now you’re getting the hang of it,” she says in a liquid gurgle. You glance down at her in alarm, just as the mast splinters and falls sideways with a gut-wrenching shriek. The skiff lurches to a standstill. The sudden impact nearly knocks you off your feet, but at least you’re not rocking anymore.

“We’re here,” she says. India ink is streaming from her eye sockets and spotting her ghostly white dress – or is that just mascara? No, her fluffy skirt is starting to roil like a pot of water that’s ready to boil over. Doesn’t matter; you’re out of here.

You abscond over the side of the boat, getting the hell away from your creepy-ass dream ghost therapist and floundering through the shallows to a pebble beach lit by the grainy light cast by the glowworms. Behind you, the boat is in the process of being sucked under the surface with a slow and tremendous crunch, making little wavelets that wash around your shoes as you stumble up the bank.

The darkness deepens to a familiar pitch away from the underground river and the lashing grey shadowy thing that used to be Rose. The silence wraps around you too, deafening you even to the sound of your footsteps. The effect is surreal.

 _Oh, right._ You pull off your shades and drop them amongst the tumbled stones. It doesn’t actually help you see, but at least now you’re not alone in the dark. You’ve got your own personal eldritch choir.

After a long trek up from the bowels of the earth, following the whispers of your sister’s kin, you reach a small room lit by the harsh glow of what appears to be – of all things – one of those old-fashioned makeup desks with a big round mirror on top and tons of little drawers and everything. On it is a big pot of dull grey face paint with a foam wedge stuck in it, along with a greyish pair of white gloves and more normal stuff like perfume bottles that don’t look like they get a lot of use.

“Oh, my! What are _you_ doing here? I wasn’t expecting company this early. Why, I don’t even have my face on yet,” says a voice you don’t recognize.

A tall, golden-masked woman stands before you, her gowned figure shimmering before your eyes. You squeeze them shut. You’re not even sure if you can trust them after what seems like an age of darkness.

Her talon-tipped hands – the only exposed skin that you could see anywhere – are green.

You know who she has to be. After all, Jade talks about her all the time.

“I’m looking for Jade. Do you know where she is?” you say, feeling ill again, or still. Did you come all this way only to find another dead woman?

“You poor dear! I’ll tell her you dropped in,” the woman promises briskly. She pats your cheek with a palm that’s smooth and dry and slick with scales. “Now off with you so I can get smartened up!”

A rain of glitter blasts you in the face before you have a chance to protest.

* * *

Around noon, there’s a boisterous banging at the door. It jolts you out of an unsettlingly lucid dream that evaporates the moment you open your eyes on nothing.

Panicking, you grab the nearest pair of pants from the pile strewn across the bed and struggle to pull them on before Terezi decides to prance in without an invitation.

You fail.

“What’s the big rush, loverboy?” she asks, and you can almost hear her giddy grin. “It’s not like I can see you! Pants are overrated anyway.”

The sound of her voice gives you an instantaneous sense of relief. Terezi’s here! Everything is going to be fine. You spread your arms, leaving the pants undone.

“You wonderful person, you. Please tell me you brought lunch.”

She moves right past your expectant embrace and throws open the windows, breathing loud and deep. “That’s better,” she huffs, before coming over to perch on your knee. She sniffs the air, seeking, and then licks a stripe up your neck. “Only one hickey? That’s so disappointing!”

Months ago you resigned yourself to the fact that no matter what word she puts on your relationship, she will still do whatever she damn well pleases with your personal space. Well, having a moirail matters to her, and face it, that’s the important thing here. If she wanted to be your sis or your bro or your bffsy you would chin up and soldier on because you owe her for putting up with your bull these last few months. Since Rose died you’ve had no one but your little monster to put you under the microscope, and she came through like a champ even when she was dealing with her own drama.

Being powerless to stop her kismesis’s second rampage hurt her Seer’s pride quite a bit. It made her question who and what she’s supposed to be in a world that’s not Alternia. You’re not sure if her powers prepared her for that little personal crisis too – for all you know, she could’ve picked you up and dropped you in a quadrant just because she knew she’d need someone like you down the road. Doesn’t mean you love her any less.

Scrubbing away her saliva, you wince. “You were expecting him to maul me?”

“I was counting on at least three,” she pouts. “Now I owe Gamzee a lap dance.” You pretend to gag, glad to have a reason to change the subject before you blurt out something about being covered in Karkat’s spooge. Knowing Terezi, she’d start drooling everywhere thinking about all that delicious candy red, and the last thing you need right now is more bodily fluids on you.

“Where’s my food?” you demand impatiently.

“What kind of food do you want?” she asks. “I’ll ask Jane to make it for you. Do you want me to bring it up after work, or should I let Karkat get it? I’m not sure when he’s going to be done, though, I think he’s planning on finishing his big project today.” You can practically hear her eyebrows wiggling at the end.

It takes you a second to realize she’s being serious about not bringing food up until later. “I asked for a fucking sandwich, T, jesus, what kind of moirail are you?”

“I am the very best moirail there is! I have left you alone for _three whole days_ because you needed time with your matesprit –“

“Boyfriend,” you mutter, but not because you mean it.

“Your matesprit! – and I would have given you as much time as you needed, only I got a note under my door that said, and I quote….” She fiddles around for a second and then sticks the slimy wet note onto your bare shoulder, dragging her tongue across it. “’Helb.’ Followed by a scribble. But I knew what you meant,” she adds, like that’s supposed to be reassuring.

Your hunger, awakened by the near prospect of having real food in your stomach for the first time in days, noisily threatens to make a meal of the rest of your viscera instead.

She squeezes your cheeks between her palms. “I _missed_ you, coolkid.”

“I missed you too, darlin’,” you tell her, your accent barely coherent through fish lips. “But I’m _hungry_ , goddammit.”

“So why don’t you get dressed and go down to the kitchen yourself? I’ve wasted enough naptime on you as it is. If I’m not outside in five minutes, Karkat will send someone upstairs to get me.”

“Uh…” Fuck. How are you supposed to explain that you were waiting for Kar to give you your clothes back without sounding completely whipped? Oh wait.

She frees herself from your arms and hops off the bed. “Those pants don’t fit you at all. Where are yours, Dave?”

“I have no fucking clue,” you admit reluctantly.

“Well, they have to be around here somewhere. Did you look in the dresser?”

You roll your eyes at her back. You pawed through every drawer in the room, but that doesn’t really count as looking, does it?

After banging around for a minute, she announces, “Dave, I am not a bloodhound.”

“I didn’t ask you to find them for me, T. They’ll turn up sooner or later.”

“I’m not a bloodhound, _but_ ,” she repeats as though you didn’t hear her right the first time, “this room smells like _boys_. Even Jade wouldn’t be able to sniff out your clothes through the stench.”

“If Jade was here she’d use her eyes to look for them like a normal person. It’s only freaks like you and me who need help with the simplest goddamn tasks.”

Her padding footsteps get closer, and then she lifts your hand, squeezing it between her own delicate paws. “Try putting your palm under the piece of paper next time,” she confides, at less than half her usual volume. “That way you can feel what you’re writing.”

“Thanks, T.” You grimace sadly up at her as she pecks your cheek and turns to leave. The door slams shut behind her.

It’s a good thing she likes you; you definitely wouldn’t have survived the last few months without her support. And if you’re proof that a human can use a moirail, surely that means it’s not crazy to talk about having a matesprit, too. Shit, let’s be trolls.

Stretching out on your back, you put your hand on your stomach and try not to think about food.

It’s not like you’re starving. Your appetite hasn’t been much ever since Jade left, just with the migraines and everything else going on. Even after the headaches went away you still haven’t been eating a lot because it took you a hot second to get over yourself and ask for a little help. Besides, you were raised by a dude who considered Fanta and Doritos to be a square meal even though personally you think Fanta tastes like liquid plastic. You’re not married to the food pyramid, is what you’re trying to say.

It’s hard, though. You thought you were getting fed and now it’s the only thing you can think about. You don’t think Karkat’s been depriving you on purpose – it probably never occurred to him that you don’t have emergency supplies stashed in your sylladex like he does, dude could have been a Boy Scout, seriously – but you have different priorities with your inventory space, you guess.

Sighing, you call up your sylladex and eject it onto the bed. You still haven’t been able to find a modus that will read you what’s on your cards, so until then, you’re stuck with the dump truck method. Most of the shit you keep in it is worthless, stuff you captchalogued years ago with the intent of throwing it at some imps or something, but lo and behold there is one thing in the heap that you can get some mileage out of.

You fish out a bottle of lubricant and shove the rest of the junk back into your sylladex.

You’d tucked away some lube, not because you actually had any particular plans for it, but because it seemed abstractly important to have on hand if you wanted to be getting laid on a regular basis. Besides, no one was going to miss one measly bottle; one of the other Daves (the one you mostly like to pretend never happened) left your bro enough supplies to fuck an entire army. Which is like, dear god, why? Did you not get the memo that he was going to be the last man on Earth, or something?

Anyway, while there’s still nothing edible, at least you can keep yourself entertained until Karkat comes back with more junk food.

Flipping back the top, you take a good whiff. You have no idea whether lube expires, but it smells fine to you, and besides, if it was going to go bad surely it would have happened a couple hundred years ago. Squirt some out and rub it between your fingers: yep, it still feels like lube too. Fascinating.

You tell yourself you’re letting it warm up, but really you’re just wasting time.

You have no idea what you’re doing here. Are you supposed to kneel upright, or stand up, like you were in the shower this morning? It was hard to keep your balance, and besides, you’re not sure your arm is really long enough to make that position comfortable. The only other option (that doesn’t involve shucking your dignity and curling up into the fetal position) is getting on your hands and knees with your butt in the air. So, you guess you’re doing that.

Ignoring the warning grumble from your stomach as you maneuver yourself into position, you mentally ream yourself for being a sucker in all things, but mostly in love.

Here goes nothing. To get yourself in the right frame of mind, you start by reaching past your backdoor to press against your taint, where Kar was touching you this morning. Sliding back, you draw a wet finger across your asshole once, to spread the gel around, and again, a little slower, to figure out what exactly you’re aiming for. Ugh, this is so weird.

On the third flyover, you dip in, letting your fingertip sit in the ring of muscle while you get used to the pressure of it. It’s tight, for sure, but you’re still not fully convinced it would make for good sex. (More convinced than you were yesterday, though. And you can’t pretend like you’ve never thought about it. Maybe if you and Jade hadn’t hooked up so quickly you would’ve done more exploring.)

Arching your back to make the angle at least a little more favorable, you sink in another half-inch or so to where the walls open up. Cautiously, you bend your finger to see how that feels.

It… doesn’t really do anything for you. See? You already learned something.

Karkat won’t be back for hours, but you’d still feel better if you were behind a locked door while you were poking around in your butt. Except now you’ve got lube on your hands and the thought of touching anything that you’d ever want to use again is kind of revolting. You could relocate to the bathroom, but that’d be hell on your knees… oh well. If someone walks in on you, there’s always the timey thing.

Pulling out, you grab another dollop of lube and reach between your legs this time. You have to hunch your back and pull your hips forward, but when you run your finger over the smooth, firm bump that is the so-called P-spot, you feel the thrill of blood rushing to your dick without even touching it or anything.

Dropping to your elbow, you make yourself comfortable and get to work.

The biggest difference from this morning is your reach; with your long fingers, you can go a lot deeper than Kar could with his thumb. Still, a light touch seems to work best – all you have to do is stroke the spot with your fingertip to make your muscles clench all the way down to your toes. The sensation is fun, but not overwhelming, not once you’ve gotten past the initial thrill. It’s like trying to tickle yourself: you’re not going to get very far by your lonesome.

Also, your dick wants attention, but you can’t spare any hands in this position, so.

Instead of giving up on the butt stuff and just jerking off, you spread your legs a little more and fire up your imagination. That’s not your hand buried inside you to the knuckle, it’s his. He’s the one nudging your body forward to brush your P-spot and then letting you rock back to your original position. No in-and-out, just a little bit of pressure and a slow, steady rhythm.

It’s working. You bow your head and pick the beat up a notch. A moment later, you gasp as your hips jerk forward; you bumped it a little harder than you meant to. Of course, that means you have to do it again, because that’s what Kar would do. Ah, shit.

You really wish you had something to put your cock into, instead of just feeling it glance off the inside of your arm as you grind down on your fingers. But even that is better than nothing, so you angle your arm alongside it and keep thrusting.

Your breath comes in short gasps as you feel yourself starting to get close. You imagine Kar laying in to you as you begin to fingerfuck yourself in earnest. Feeling something actually sliding in and out of your body is really fucking weird, but you get used to it in a big hurry because it’s still not enough.

Giving in to the need to get as close as you can to the real thing, you finally add a second finger, pausing for an “Ah, fuck,” breath-catching moment of adjustment before you can start moving again. It doesn’t take long to get back into it. Before you know it, you’re almost there, grinding back hard and fast on your knuckles, dick throbbing, knees aching, and mouth parched from panting Karkat’s name… and that’s when you realize that the sound you heard almost a minute ago was the door opening.

Panicking and crouched on the bed with two fingers up your ass, you catch yourself on the verge of stopping the clock. You don’t do it, though. Even time travel can’t fix stupid.

“Don’t mind me,” Kar says, trying to sound collected and not even getting remotely close. “I’m just admiring the view.”

You collapse face first into the pillow in dizzy relief. With a mouthful of cotton and a tongue that feels like it’s covered in fuzz, you say something that would never pass for English from a native speaker.

There’s a rustling sound that better fucking be your boyfriend ripping off his clothes because every second you spend not fucking him is a second shaved off of your lifespan. You’re dripping actual drops of pre-cum on the bed and you sincerely hope he fucking appreciates what you’ve been through today that left you ready for him the moment he walked through the door.

Spitting out the wad of pillowcase, you hoarse out, “Get. The fuck over here. Right. Fucking. _Now_.”

“Yes, princess,” he answers wryly. “As you wish, princess.” You recognize the snap of the lube bottle being opened, and then the bed tilts a little to the right as he joins you, laying his hand over yours.

“I can take it from here,” he says. You slide your fingers out, marveling at the strange empty feeling they leave behind. You only have a second to appreciate it before he replaces them with his own, shorter but thicker and stronger, and begins to move them almost languidly as he caresses your skin, running his hand down your side and around your hip. He squeezes your ass a little, spreading your cheeks. When he finally reaches around to palm your cock, you groan in ecstasy.

Your backbone begins to sag between your shoulder blades as the effort to hold yourself together while he’s working you over slowly becomes a losing battle. It would be so easy to come like this, but you don’t want to, not after your one-sided bout in the shower this morning. You force yourself to sit back on your heels, blindly clutching about for a shirt or something else to grab him by so you can throw yourself on top of him and fuck him until he can’t remember his own name. When you realize that he’s not wearing a shirt but he’s still got his fucking pants on you want to cry, numb, slippery fingers fumbling clumsily at the zipper.

“Let me do it,” he gasps. You give up on the pants and just tackle him down onto the bed as he scrabbles for purchase on his belt. With a hand fisted in his hair you go at his neck and shoulder, kissing him, biting him, grinding against his crotch until he bucks you off so he can yank his pants down. From that position – laying on your side, still cradling him in your arms – you pull him to your lips, plastering his open mouth as he squirms out of the pants. He throws a leg over your hip and pulls your bodies together, reaching down to guide you in.

His nook is as hot and wet as his mouth, and you bury yourself in both, hooking your arm under his leg to spread him wider. He whimpers into your mouth with every thrust, but as soon as you come up for air he’s begging, pleading for you to fuck him hard, sobbing with need. That’s the only encouragement you need to get back on top of him.

“Dave. Dave! Fuck, _Dave!_ Oh god, oh fuck, Dave, Dave, _Dave!_ ” he shouts, lifting his hips until there’s a good six inches of air between his ass and the bed. He somehow still has the leverage to push back; he must be bracing himself against the headboard or something. You drape his other leg over your arm and fuck him like that, leaning over him as he’s bent nearly double with his knees in the air screaming your name.

He feels so tight and hot and wet and _right_ under you, everything you’ve been craving for the last two days. You want to cocoon up together in the sheets, bodies plastered together, fucking and fighting and making love without ever having to come apart. If you could capture this moment and save it, you would, the whole thing, every tight muscle and stinging drop of sweat testifying to the sheer pleasure of fucking someone who drives you crazy in all the right ways.

As much as it kills you sometimes thinking about how many people have a claim on him – how he hands pieces of his heart out like it’s a fucking sample platter – you believe him when he says that you’re the only one who will ever have him like this.

“You’re – so good, Kar, I’m gonna –“

“Yes, do it, give it to me, _fuck!_ ” he cries, clawing you so violently that he’s going to draw blood despite his dulled nails. But only one hand is holding on to you for dear life; the other’s still locked over his head, stretching his body out for miles under you as his hips jerk frantically against your thrusts.

His body is slick and hard against yours, hot and demanding with an appetite to match. You hardly make it past _how the fuck could I possibly deserve this_ before you’re pouring into him and collapsing onto his chest, smashing your noses together in a weak but fervent kiss. His mouth opens hungrily under yours as he takes your wrist and guides it lower. Barely giving yourself time to catch your breath, you slip your hand between his legs to bring him to his own climax, holding the rim of the bucket that showed up out of fucking nowhere against his thighs with one knee and supporting his back as he kicks and whines and finally spurts your cum into the pail and falls limp to the bed.

Throwing your leg over his hips, you smear your hand through the sticky puddle of warmth on his stomach and scrape it onto the edge of the bucket, counting on at least a little to run into the bottom and mix with your own genetic material (you’d make a terrible troll, okay, but nobody can ding you for not trying). After carrying out this final duty you drop on him, kicking back the sheets and shoving everything else on the bed out of reach as you make him your own personal hot stone.

“That was fucking incredible,” you tell him, basking in his sublime warmth while he rubs your back and laughs shakily into your hair.

You’re almost asleep, breathing mostly your own carbon dioxide with your face crammed into the base of his neck, when he decides to rid himself of your dead weight before you go into full hibernation.

Rolling over to face you, nose to nose, he tells you that he loves you so much he brought you a whole stack of blueberry lemon bars courtesy of one Crocker kitchen goddess, and if you still want them he thinks he might have dropped them somewhere over by the door. He assures you that the five-second rule is more like a suggestion for someone as prestigious as a Hero of Time.

It’s precisely at that moment that you decide you’re going to smother him in his sleep as soon as your body stops feeling like a limp noodle.

You dream some strangely vivid dream that starts out with Jade and her gorgeous smile and show-stopping curves and the heavy, fruit-scented weight of her hair. You remember sinking into her as you promise never to take her granted, never to stop thanking whatever cosmic force might conceivably have some say in your being for seeing fit to bring the two of you together in just the right way so that you were able to latch on to each other instead of ricocheting off and losing all hope of reconnecting as you drifted farther and farther apart.

After a while the torrent of words flowing from your mouth begins to lose its meaning and then it stops making sense altogether, and it’s so weird to hear the things you’re saying that you shut up and listen because duh, dreaming.

Every molecule of you strains to hear, but it’s too quiet. You realize the voice is not actually coming from your throat so much as right behind it, and you’re struggling to remember what part of your body that would be. And then there’s a note you recognize, that jars your memory; your perceptions undergo a transformation as you stop trying to make the voice your own. Just as you’re cradling Jade in your arms and spilling your stream of consciousness into her ears, there’s another, behind you, holding you and whispering at the edge of hearing. You abruptly wonder how you could have ever mistaken Karkat’s husky purr for anything but.

“I’m here, baby, right here, I got you, baby. Love you so much, Dave baby, more than you will ever know. Gonna hold you till she comes home, baby, you and me and soon we’ll be three and then we’ll be four and I’d be yours forever if I could. Need you to know, baby….”

As you waken fully into your body you realize that you’ve been grinding back onto him, that the sensation of his erect bulge pressing against your flesh is as much your doing as it is his.

You’ve never needed anything as much as you need this right now.

He eases you open, lovingly, using his own thick, slippery fluid to coat his fingers. By the time he guides himself in, you’re struck dumb by the sheer overwhelming physicality of containing a piece of him, of being his shelter and his home, if only for this little while.

He holds you close as his breath stirs your hair, and you clutch at his hands and stare wide-eyed into the dark as the rustle of sheets and the soothing vibration of his voice box at the nape of your neck lull you to stillness. It’s lazy and gentle and sweet, with his leg tangled over and between yours and your body enfolded in his solid, wiry frame.

You want more. You want to feel him flush against you, to use you like he did the other morning. Like he did the first time, when he climbed onto your dick and conquered it like Mount fucking Everest just when you were starting to think that maybe it’d been a mistake to polish yourself off over his needy as fuck bedroom eyes as soon as you got back to your room. You want him to use you like you used him not too long ago.

He says no. Until the word leaves his lips, you didn’t know it was the one you wanted to hear, because even though you trust him you’re still scared as hell of not being the one in control.

Karkat positions you on your back and arranges your limbs. You don’t do anything except stay where he puts you and follow his shifting weight with your eyes.

If you were him, you’d be freaked out by the creepy, unfocused bulbs staring wide-eyed back at you, but he doesn’t seem to mind that much. For him this is you at your most open, and that’s fucked up, but in the end you’re glad for it. You should have gotten rid of the shades yourself a long time ago.

He stuffs something beneath you to cushion your lower back and hugs your knee to his chest, which brings his bulge alongside your dick. One experimental thrust aligns your hips perfectly, eliciting a pleased growl from him that raises goosebumps on your neck and arms and sends your pulse downhill. He kisses the side of your knee and eases himself back in, fitting more smoothly this time.

He definitely has more control in this position. You can feel the difference immediately as the ache begins to set in, but he goes slow, doesn’t put as much weight on you as he could, doesn’t hold you so tightly that you couldn’t push him away.

“I want you to think about Jade,” he says, the motion of his pelvis stalling at the peak of each thrust, seating himself deeper inside you than he was able to when you were spooning. You concentrate on trying to follow his lead, not sure you’re ready to bring a third party into the equation until you work out how you feel about what‘s already happening.

“She’s upside down, leaning over you. Can you see her?” Furrowing your eyebrows, you refuse to take the bait, but he doesn’t take the hint. “Her hair is falling in curtains, it tickles where it touches your neck, and there’s a ringlet caught on her glasses. She’s wearing lip gloss and nail polish and not much else, and she smells like… what does she smell like?”

“Conditioner,” you answer, not pleased that he tricked you into participating, but the ‘not much else’ part piqued your interest more than you’d like to admit. Biting your lip, you fail to stifle a gasp as you arch to meet him. He obliges, deepening his thrusts, approval thrumming in his throat.

“Yeah, that’s right. Green – green apple.”

You can almost imagine that the shadow that covers your eyes is just her thick, dark hair, blotting out the rest of the room like a privacy screen.

He takes his precious time. There’s no rush and plenty of lube and all the time in the world to enjoy this strange new closeness, and if it isn’t building very quickly, well, it’s still building, stroking his velvety skin and feeling his hips rolling into yours, knowing that he could have been fucking you face first into the mattress but he wanted you to know what it’s like to invite someone else in.

“Her fingers are laced under your chin. As she bends down her lips part and she gives you a long, slow kiss. She likes kissing because of what it represents. She’s offering her body to receive yours. Sex isn’t just about pleasure, for her.”

Holy fuck do you miss Jade. His own mouth is out of reach, but you can still play his game, tilting your chin back and parting your lips. He notices. “Can you taste her?” he asks.

“Yeah.” Your tongue cleaves to the roof of your mouth, and you swallow to wet it.

“She wants to receive you, and this is where it starts. She teases you with the tip of her tongue, but what she really wants is to draw you out, to take your tongue into her mouth until she’s almost swallowing you.” He reaches forward, leaning against your leg to lay his hand across your mouth so you can probe the gap between his fingers. Your hamstrings are burning, but you’re concentrating on Jade’s lips, kissing and sucking and thrusting your tongue between his fingers.

There’s a hitch in the pace of his thrusts, and he says, “Oh, god, Dave….”

With your eyes shut tight, you’re making out sloppily with the palm of his hand, letting his fantasy come alive in your head. The weird thing is that it’s not even that weird. He’s getting off on it as much as you are, and everything else is irrelevant right now.

“She’s moaning into your mouth, ready for more,” he says as he pulls his hand away. “She moves forward, and as she does you can feel the tip of her breast touch your cheek. You take it into your mouth. She loves it when you play with her breasts, doesn’t she?”

Nodding, your breath shuddering through your teeth, you imagine her resting her arms on your chest as you circle the hard bud of one nipple, pulling it into your mouth and sucking, making her gasp. Like low-hanging fruit, they’re tantalizing, and you switch to the other side and flick your tongue against its erect tip as she keens into her forearm.

“Fuck, Jade – Kar, please –“

“She wants to give you the same pleasure you’re giving her,” he says, his voice sounding hoarser with each passing minute. “Her hair trails down your body as she moves forward on her hands and knees until she’s leaning over your dick. Her breath touches you. You want her so fucking bad, don’t you? You can feel the heat between her legs, and you know what she wants.”

The anticipation of imaginary Jade giving you imaginary head is making you hard in a very real and unfair way, and Karkat knows it, you’re laid out right in front of him, and he’s milking it anyway. You might hate him if you weren’t enjoying it so much.

“For her sex a ritual, and that means it has a purpose.” He subtly shifts the angle of his body against yours, and you feel the tip of his bulge when it brushes your prostate. You pretend the jolt is Jade’s fingertips running down the length of your dick, her lips poised at its head, waiting for Karkat to tell her that it’s time to go down on you.

“The first part is the offering. It starts with a kiss, but it’s really the whole process of presenting herself to you. The second part is entry,” he says, making a loose, fluid-moistened fist and positioning it at the head of your cock – Jade’s lips, her tongue, teasing. With his other hand he palms your chin, fingertips resting on either side of your nose. You kiss the slit between his fingers.

“Why does she taste like you,” you murmur into his cupped hand.

“Maybe she already had her way with me.”

That’s a great answer. You lick a line through his fingers, feeling your dick slide into his fist at the same time. It’s not quite the same as having Jade’s mouth on you, but it’s warm and slick and feels fucking amazing anyway.

He runs his thumb around the head, simulating her tongue, and when he slides down he goes agonizingly slowly. You focus on the cleft at the base of his fingers, right where her clit would be, and imagine her groaning, flexing her back to give you better access as she swallows more of your length. If Jade was here, you’d hook your elbows around her thighs and spread them wide so you could delve into her. Instead, all you can do is run your tongue through the gap in his fingers and wish she was sixty-nineing with you for real.

“After entry is the exchange of mutual pleasure,” he says as he starts to tug your shaft. You cry out, pressing upwards, fucking her desperately with your tongue as your hips buck impatiently, needing to be in her, needing more than the feather-light, teasing grazes across your prostate as he thrusts up into you.

“Jade!” you gasp, hips rolling into his thrusts, and he slips his fingers into your mouth, pressing down on the back of your tongue. You arch your back as he finally starts fucking you the way you wanted him to. You’re gasping around his fingers for air, eyes fluttering shut.

“The fourth,” he says, making a monumental effort to finish his narrative, “the fourth is accepting your genetic material, that’s the purpose, that’s the reason for the ritual, she wants to have part of you to keep, that’s why she comes when you do, Dave –“ it’s a hoarse pant – “She’s riding you now, singing your name, Dave, she needs you to come for her, Dave, Dave, oh god….”

You have a fleeting moment of oxygen-deprived insanity as you dissolve into the rock-hard reality of the divine beast between your legs before he calls you back. “Come for Jade, she wants you, Dave baby, come for her baby, come on….”

The sensation peaks past all limits of self-control. Your world finishes whiting out as you scream, choking on his fingers as he spills into you, repeating your name like it’s the only word he knows.

The world slowly fades back to black as Karkat comes out, straightening your sore legs and curling up next to you with his cheek on your chest and his horn digging into your collarbone.

“I adore you,” he says, tired and happy.

You try to reconstruct his face from memory, ornamenting it with the same lovelorn look he’s always giving Jade. It doesn’t feel right. Is that really what he looks like? Are you positive? Are you sure that you’re the one he’s talking to?

Goddamn, what the hell did he do to you? Were you already blind before you let him fuck you?

Fighting panic, you take a deep breath. The sleek suede of his skin alongside your own is real enough, isn’t it? The thumping of his heart in counter-time with yours is proof that can’t be falsified. The profound depth of feeling in his voice, that’s damn well unmistakable.

Once you take stock, there’s no vacancy left for doubt. You do trust him. You’d put your happiness in his hands all over again in a heartbeat. Still… still, you wish you could see his face. Just to see that look in his eyes one more time. Just to be sure.

You groan, half in afterglow and half in pain – fucking hell, everything hurts. You’ve got to take up yoga or something, get limber. Linking your arms around his shoulders, you stare blankly at the ceiling and feel the world turning beneath you.

“I wanna try it with you behind me next time.”

You picture his cheek twitch, his affectionate blink. “Yes, princess.”

Sometime later, you stir and stretch. “What time is it?”

“Only eight o’clock,” he says, his throat buzzing against your cooling skin. “I came back early because I had something to show you, but, you know, I got a little distracted.”

You grin, remembering what he was distracted by. “What did you want to show me?”

He pushes himself up with fingers splayed against your stomach. “It’s on the roof.” Smacking your thigh, he adds, “Get up, you shiftless freeloader, you can’t leave the room like this.”

“Freeloader, my ass!”

“Dude, you’re like a sponge for body heat.”

“You’re such a dick, you know that? I’ll get up when you get off me.”

You jump into the shower, soaping your face and under your arms and between your legs and letting the steam take care of the rest, before throwing a towel over your head and making a beeline for the bed. You’ve just decided you don’t really care who sees you in Karkat’s clothes. If they don’t already know you’re his, then you’ll just have to scream louder next time he fucks you.

He catches you by the arm. “Don’t you want to wear your own clothes?”

“Where are they?”

He snorts rudely, like he can’t believe you haven’t figured it out yet. “In the hamper, dumbass, where else?”

Pulling on your wrinkled, crusty jeans, you take one whiff of the tee shirt that’s been buried in a pile of dirty clothes for four days and opt to wear one of his clean ones anyway, even though they’re all dark grey or black. It’s a little loose on you; even if you’re maybe half an inch taller than him, he has at least fifteen extra pounds of muscle on you. Probably more since you stopped strifing.

You hate wearing dark tee shirts most of the time – it makes you look like a ghost with your skinny white neck sticking out of the collar – but the statement you’re making today has nothing to do with fashion.

“Let’s go,” you tell him, feeling a thrill of excitement. You practically drag him out of his block and up the staircase, counting steps as you go, one hand in his and the other clutching the rail. When you burst through the door and into the open air and feel the wind on your skin, you laugh breathlessly and fall backward into his arms. It’s the first cool breeze of autumn. Jade’ll be home soon.

With a wry chuckle, he leads you to some metal stairs that didn’t used to be there, the surface crisscrossed with grooves for traction. Up three steps and through a screen door – he says they’ll hang a real door before the rains start – and into a box filled with an electric hum and the whirring of fans.

“Watch your step, there’re wires all over the floor,” he says. Then he lets go of your hand. There’s a click, followed by a sound like radio static coming from your left, a familiar noise that reminds you of hurricane season back in your old apartment. You find the source – it’s a stereo.

He does something, and the room suddenly fills with thudding bass. He must have dragged your whole sound system out here. When he dials the volume down, you realize that it’s not just coming from the speakers; it’s coming from the shitty little boombox too.

And then Karkat gives you an object that’s heavy and cold and fits your hand better than the hilt of a sword ever did. His fingernail digs into the side of it and flips a switch, and he tells you to say something.

“Something,” you parrot back dryly into the mic. It echoes off to the left, from the region of the radio on the counter. Karkat turns off the music so you can hear yourself better.

“Hello? Testing, one, two, three, testing.”

There it is again, your tinny voice, coming out of the dusty speakers of a piece of equipment so old and outdated that it probably has a tape deck and a meter-long, telescoping antenna.

You put on your best angry cosmonaut impression and shout, “American components, Russian components, all made in Taiwan!”

Laughing fit to burst, you throw yourself at a speechless Karkat (who didn’t expect to hear Armageddon quoted at him today, especially not from _you_ ), sandwiching his beautiful face between your free hand and the microphone and kissing him sloppily. You’re grinning so hard that you think you might have pulled something in your face. Like, permanently.

He drapes his arms around you, sounding relieved as he asks, “Like it?”

“Like it?!” you answer, stretching until your lips brush the metal mesh. You lower your voice to a throaty growl. “This is DJ Dave Dogg rockin’ out at you from the ether on Sanctuary’s first and only rooftop radio station. Get ready to bounce, ahahaha!” Hanging from his neck, you gasp for breath as you dissolve into helpless laughter, giggling until tears roll down your cheeks.

“Good,” he says, happily. You can hear him smiling. “I was hoping you would.”

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr! [blueraspberrybubblegum](http://blueraspberrybubblegum.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Theme for Dave: ["Weapon of Choice" - Fatboy Slim](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCDIYvFmgW8)
> 
> See you next time!


End file.
